BiS4EV: A fast routing algorithm considering charging stations and preferences for electric vehicles

Electric Vehicles (EVs) have grown in recent years as they have become a promising alternative to traditional fossil fuel-driven vehicles. As a result, new routing algorithms that consider both the locations of charging stations and the charging preferences of users are necessary to maintain urban traffic efficiency. This paper proposes a Constrained Route Planning (CRP) approach, called BiS4EV, to provide efficient route planning for EVs in large urban road networks. CRP is an NP-hard problem. BiS4EV introduces a two-layered structure to solve the CRP problem for EVs. In the first layer, BiS4EV integrates the locations of charging stations and the battery consumption on each road arc into a road network graph and proposes a fast routing algorithm that considers the constraints of battery capacity and charging preferences to find the shortest feasible path for EVs. The second layer incorporates charging policies to the obtained path, which forms a complete route plan for EVs. Such a two-layered method breaks down the complexity of the problem and avoids directly solving the entire NP-hard problem. We have proved the correctness of the proposed approach in theory, and the presented experimental results verified the efficiency and the effectiveness of BiS4EV from the practical aspect.