2024 CEC Special Session

Electric vehicles (EVs) are gradually changing our lifestyles. Many new optimization problems appears. When EV meets EC, what will happen?

Introduction

In order to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality, many countries have begun to upgrade the energy and related industries. One of the important ways is to replace traditional fuel vehicles by electric vehicles (EVs). Deadlines for banning the sale of fuel vehicles have been set in many places. We can clearly see that the number of EVs is increasing rapidly.

From the perspective of EV itself, since charging currently is still much slower than refueling, the application of EVs leads to new optimization problems, such as electric vehicle routing problems, electric vehicle charging problems, and electric public transportation scheduling problems. Due to the charging behavior, these problems are usually more complex than their classical ones like vehicle routing problems and arc routing problems.

Meanwhile, the increasing usage of EVs requires more charging stations. It also brings a greater load on the power grid than before. Thus, in terms of infrastructure, EVs also present new challenges like charging station locating, sizing, and pricing. To stabilize the power grid load, some scholars have proposed a new strategy that allows EVs to sale electricity back to the grid, which is called Vehicle to Grid (V2G). If many new strategies like V2G are applied, these problems become even more complicated.

This special session aims to discuss how evolutionary computation can be applied to the optimization or decision-making problems brought by electric vehicles. Meanwhile, we are very interested in the problems that are not widespread today but may be ubiquitous in the future, like V2G. The special session also aims to facilitate communication between engineers in the new energy industry and developers in the EC community to solve EV-related issues.

Scope

Since the development of EV is so fast, all papers that concern EC applications or theory about EV related problems are welcomed. The scope of the special session includes, but not limited to the following topics:

Electric vehicle routing problem
Electric vehicle routing problem with time window
Electric vehicle routing problem with non-linear charging
Electric vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery
Electric vehicle routing problem with drones
Other electric vehicle routing problem variants
Electric arc routing problem
Electric public transportation scheduling
Electric public transportation path planning
Traveling salesman problem with concerns of electric vehicles
Electric vehicle charging station locating and sizing
Fixed route vehicle charging problem
Charging station recommendation
Charging planning or scheduling
Charging pricing
Decision makings of purchase/sell electricity under V2G
Interaction between transportation and power grid
Traffic assignment with concerns of electric vehicles
Multi-agent systems with electric devices
Traffic flow forecasting and charging demand forecasting
Multi/many-objective variants of these problems
Dynamic/Stochastic variants of these problems