Smart Charging Benefits in Autonomous Mobility on Demand Systems

In this paper, we study the potential benefits from smart charging for a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) providing autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) services. We first consider a profit-maximizing platform operator who makes decisions for routing, charging, rebalancing, and pricing for rides based on a network flow model. Clearly, each of these decisions directly influence the fleet's smart charging potential; however, it is not possible to directly characterize the effects of various system parameters on smart charging under a classical network flow model. As such, we propose a modeling variation that allows us to decouple the charging and routing problems faced by the operator. This variation allows us to provide closed-form mathematical expressions relating the charging costs to the maximum battery capacity of the vehicles as well as the fleet operational costs. We show that investing in larger battery capacities and operating more vehicles for rebalancing reduces the charging costs, while increasing the fleet operational costs. Hence, we study the trade-off the operator faces, analyze the minimum cost fleet charging strategy, and provide numerical results illustrating the smart charging benefits to the operator.