Seminar (Dept. of Management Science and Engineering)

Theme：Scaling Up EV Battery Swapping Services in Cities: Joint Location and Repairable-Inventory Model and Algorithm

Speaker：Yuli Zhang (School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology)

Time：2022-05-11 10:00

Address：Online Meeting

Language：Chinese/English

ABSTRACT：

Battery swapping for electric vehicle refueling is reviving and thriving. Despite a captivating sustainable future where swapping batteries will be as convenient as refueling gas today, tensions are mounting in practice: On one hand, it is desirable to maximize battery proximity and availability to customers. On the other hand, power grids for charging depleted batteries are not accessible everywhere. To reconcile this tension, some cities are embracing a “swap-locally, charge-centrally” infrastructure network. In this paper, we aim to understand whether and how to design such a network. This task is complicated by non-Poisson swaps, and by the intertwined stochastic operations of swapping, charging, stocking, and circulating batteries among facilities. We tackle these complexities by deriving analytical models, which enrich the classical batched repairable-inventory theory. We next propose a model for citywide deployment of hub charging stations, which jointly determines the location, allocation, and reorder quantity decisions with a non-convex non-concave objective function. We solve this problem exactly by exploiting submodularity and combining constraint-generation and parameter-search techniques. Even for solving convexified problems, our algorithm brings a speedup of at least three orders of magnitude relative to Gurobi solver. We further deliver managerial insights and identify planning and operational flexibilities such as order splitting.