Design of Coordinated EV Traffic Control Strategies for Expressway System with Wireless Charging Lanes

With the development of dynamic wireless power transfer (DWPT) technology, the introduction of wireless charging lanes (WCLs) in traffic systems is seen as a promising trend for electrified transportation. Though there has been extensive discussion about the planning and allocation of WCLs in different situations, studies on traffic control models for WCLs are relatively lacking. Thus, this paper aims to design a coordinated optimization strategy for managing electric vehicle (EV) traffic on an expressway network, which integrates a corridor traffic flow model with a wireless power transmission model. Two components are considered in the control objective: the total energy increased for the EVs and the total number of EVs served by the expressway, over the problem horizon. By setting the trade-off coefficients for these two objectives, our model can be used to achieve mixed optimization of WCL traffic management. The decisions include metering of different on-ramps as well as routing plans for different groups of EVs defined by origin/destination pairs and initial SOC levels. The control problem is formulated as a novel linear programming model, rendering an efficient solution. Numerical examples are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed traffic control model. The results show that with the properly designed traffic management strategy, a notable increase in charging performance can be achieved by compromising slightly the traffic performance while maintaining overall smooth operation throughout the expressway system.