A paper on electric vehicle charging that was written by an Associate Professor of Operations Management has been accepted for publication in the journal, Operations Research.
The paper, ‘An exponential cone programming approach for managing electric vehicle charging’ was written by Yangfang Helen Zhou from the Lee Kong Chian School of Business; Long He of the School of Business, George Washington University; and Li Chen from the Institute of Operations Research and Analytics, National University of Singapore. The paper examines issues with operating commercial EV charging stations.
For Zhou, who is also a Lee Kong Chian Fellow, this is her second publication on the broad scheme of electric mobility and green transportation.
This paper follows her earlier study on business model innovation for smart charging EVs which was published in 2021 in the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management journal.
In the latest study, the team used an exponential cone programming (ECP) approach to examine the problem of commercial charging stations that have to serve many EVs with a stochastic or difficult to predict pattern of arrivals, departures and charging requirements on a large scale.
As the growth of global EV adoption depends on the feasibility and availability of public charging options, the researchers took the perspective of EV charging service providers which have to balance customer needs with the total electricity cost these service providers incur.
These costs include demand charges, and costs related to the highest per-period electricity used in a finite time horizon.
The study showed that the ECP approach, benchmarked against two other common approaches, is the best one to solve the stated EV charging problem, after having considered three practical implementation issues.
The ECP approach can also generate managerial insights that can offer guidance to EV charging service providers and help policymakers design electricity tariff structures to smooth electricity load.
According to Associate Professor Zhou and her fellow investigators, there are “a few promising avenues to extend this work”. She added that she is building a body of work on electric mobility and green transportation, with another two papers in the pipeline.
“There are many fantastic research problems in this growing and extremely promising field that are likely to have high direct industry impact,” she said.
