Scheduling Ev Battery Swap/Charge Operations

With the increasing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs), drivers want their vehicle batteries to be charged in a few minutes; at present, this is feasible only if battery service stations replace the EV battery pack with a fully charged battery pack. In this paper, we formulate the scheduling problem for battery swap stations, aiming to provide the drivers timing guarantees for different types of EVs, each with its own sporadic/periodic arrival pattern and deadline constraint. To solve this problem, we analyze its unique characteristics from a real-time scheduling perspective, with the main challenge being the circular timing dependency between two distinct scheduling processes: the swapping operation and the charging operation. We first derive a sufficient condition that decouples the dependency and then develop scheduling policies and timing guarantee techniques, designed for not only being specialized for the problem but also accommodating the sufficient condition in a time-predictable and resource-efficient manner. While the problem formulation and solution hold significance as the first attempt to establish real-time scheduling principles for battery swap stations, we also address how to accommodate real-world EV arrivals at a swapping station that do not necessarily follow a sporadic/periodic pattern. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed principles not only in addressing the formulated problem but also in accommodating real-world EV arrival patterns via simulation and a case study.