The Impact of Regenerative Braking in Electric Vehicles to Energy-efficient Routing Performance

Regenerative braking has been demonstrated as an effective way in prolonging the mileages of electric vehicle (EV). In this paper, we aim to examine a generic research problem on how to better utilise the regenerative braking for energy efficiency when routing EV. To this end, we consider a Markov decision process (MDP) based model with 4 distinct reward functions to plan the paths for the EV to traverse a hilly landscape. The results show that by using net energy used as the reward function, the most energy-efficient path can be found. In addition, taking proactive detours can be an energy-efficient way to either avoid excessive energy consumption or prompt energy regeneration.