Optimal Electric Vehicles Route Planning with Traffic Flow Prediction and Real-Time Traffic Incidents

Abstract

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are regarded to be among the most environmentally and economically efficient transportation solutions. However, barriers and range limitations hinder this technology’s progress and deployment. In this paper, we examine EV route planning to derive optimal routes considering energy consumption by analyzing historical trajectory data. More specifically, we propose a novel approach for EV route planning that considers real-time traffic incidents, road topology, charging station locations during battery failure, and finally, traffic flow prediction extracted from historical trajectory data to generate energy maps. Our approach consists of four phases: the off-line phase which aims to build the energy graph, the application of the A* algorithm to deliver the optimal EV path, the NEAT trajectory clustering which aims to produce dense trajectory clusters for a given period of the day, and finally, the on-line phase based on our algorithm to plan an optimal EV path based on real traffic incidents, dense trajectory clusters, road topology information, vehicle characteristics, and charging station locations. We set up experiments on real cases to establish the optimal route for electric cars, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.