These restrictions, the dependence of battery depletion on the type of road and the limited range of electric vehicles need to be taken into account for routing. There should be charging stations along the route, reachable without long detours. Additionally, alternatives should be available in case the targeted charging station is broken or fully occupied.
Challenge
Our industry partner TomTom is one of the largest routing providers, and as such wants to provide solutions for electric vehicles as well. While they have good solutions for individual routing already, they are interested in analyzing and possibly improving the charging infrastructure in general. In particular, there is no general coverage map available yet. This is due to the unclear definition of what good charging station coverage means. Such a map would allow for targeted improvement of the infrastructure as well as better routing.
Vision
We want to develop a sensible measure for charging station coverage that reflects the influence of the local charging station infrastructure on travel times. We also want to incorporate the robustness to charging station failure and traffic peaks. This requires lots of domain knowledge on routing, such as the relation between traffic density and travelling speed. Together with our project partner, we will choose suitable models for routing that makes use of the charging station infrastructure. We will analyze and visualize the results in order to find weaknesses in the infrastructure and gain a better understanding of the coverage. Finally, we want to use this knowledge to improve routing with respect to the infrastructure density and robustness.