Design and Optimization of Electric Autonomous Vehicles with Renewable Energy Source for Smart Cities

Electric autonomous vehicles provide a promising solution to the traffic congestion and air pollution problems in future smart cities. Considering intensive energy consumption, charging becomes of paramount importance to sustain the operation of these systems. Motivated by the innovations in renewable energy harvesting, we leverage solar energy to power autonomous vehicles via charging stations and solar-harvesting rooftops, and design a framework that optimizes the operation of these systems from end to end. With a fixed budget, our framework first optimizes the locations of charging stations based on historical spatial-temporal solar energy distribution and usage patterns, achieving (2 + ϵ) factor to the optimal. Then a stochastic algorithm is proposed to update the locations online to adapt to any shift in the distribution. Based on the deployment, a strategy is developed to assign energy requests in order to minimize their traveling distance to stations while not depleting their energy storage. Equipped with extra harvesting capability, we also optimize route planning to achieve a reasonable balance between energy consumed and harvested en-route. Our extensive simulations demonstrate the algorithm can approach the optimal solution within 10-15% approximation error, and improve the operating range of vehicles by up to 2-3 times compared to other competitive strategies.

I. Introduction

The future smart cities exemplify how computation and information flow are coordinated between end devices and infrastructure for automation. Transportation is one of the driving impetus for this evolution as most of the metropolises like Los Angles, Beijing and New Delhi suffer from persistent traffic congestion, which remains as one of the major contributors to air pollution. Studies found that traffic congestion is responsible for 56 billion pounds of carbon dioxide pollution [1] and this number keeps climbing. Electric vehicles have been a green solution and their possession enjoys a rapid growth recently. Meanwhile, the recent advance in artificial intelligence makes it possible to learn from end-to- end for autonomous driving [2], which rises as a promising, or presumably, the ultimate solution to traffic congestion [3]. A marriage of these two powerhouse technologies would reshape the auto industry as major manufacturers like Ford, BMW and Volve have already made their moves to go electrification with autonomous designs.