Online Optimization of Integrated Charging and Parking Services considering Vehicle Relocation

Abstract

<p>This paper investigates the online optimization of integrated charging and parking services in a parking lot with both charging and parking spaces. We leverage emerging autonomous valet parking technologies to enable vehicle relocation operations during service durations. This relocation flexibility allows releasing occupied charging spaces upon completing a vehicle's charging process. Furthermore, when a vehicle requiring charging finds no available charging spaces, it can temporarily be situated in a parking space and subsequently relocated to a charging space as soon as one becomes available. Such operations have the potentials to improve charging facility utilization and service level. We propose a rolling horizon optimization framework to manage parking lot operations. In each time slot, new reservation requests are received, and decisions are made regarding their acceptance and service scheduling. The schedules are dynamically reoptimized in later time slots to account for new information such as new reservations and order cancellations. We develop three online strategies to derive operational decisions, with an offline optimization model as a benchmark to assess their performance. Numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of these strategies under various scenarios. The results demonstrate the significant advantages of non-myopic strategies over myopic ones when configured with proper parameter values. Moreover, incorporating vehicle relocation yields considerable profit improvements and charging facility utilization enhancements. Finally, a comprehensive sensitivity analysis investigates the impact of varying key parameter values on strategy performance and the magnitude of system improvements enabled by vehicle relocation operations.</p>