Mobile Charging as a Service: A Reservation-Based Approach

This paper aims to design an intelligent mobile charging control mechanism for Electric Vehicles (EVs), by promoting charging reservations (including service start time, expected charging time, and charging location, etc.). EV mobile charging could be implemented as an alternative recharging solution, wherein charge replenishment is provided by economically mobile plug-in chargers, capable of providing on-site charging services. With intelligent charging management, readily available mobile chargers are predictable and could be efficiently scheduled towards EVs with charging demand, based on updated context collected from across the charging network. The context can include critical information relating to charging sessions as well as charging demand, etc. Further with reservations introduced, accurate estimations on charging demand for a future moment are achievable, and correspondingly, optimal mobile chargersselection can be obtained. Therefore, charging demands across the network can be efficiently and effectively satisfied, with the support of intelligent system-level decisions. In order to evaluate critical performance attributes, we further carry out extensive simulation experiments with practical concerns to verify our insights observed from the theoretical analysis. Results show great performance gains by promoting the reservation-based mobile charger-selection, especially for mobile chargers equipped with suffice power capacity.