Two-Phase Bicriterion Search for Finding Fast and Efficient Electric Vehicle Routes

Abstract: The problem of finding an electric vehicle route that optimizes both driving time and energy consumption can be modeled as a bicriterion path problem. Unfortunately, the problem of finding optimal bicriterion paths is NP-complete. This paper studies such problems restricted to two-phase paths, which correspond to a common way people drive electric vehicles, where a driver uses one driving style (say, minimizing driving time) at the beginning of a route and another driving style (say, minimizing energy consumption) at the end. We provide efficient polynomial-time algorithms for finding optimal two-phase paths in bicriterion networks, and we empirically verify the effectiveness of these algorithms for finding good electric vehicle driving routes in the road networks of various U.S. states. In addition, we show how to incorporate charging stations into these algorithms, in spite of the computational challenges introduced by the negative energy consumption of such network vertices.