Optimal recharge and driving strategies for a battery-powered electric vehicle

A major problem facing battery-powered electric vehicles is in their batter ies: weight and charge capacity. Thus, a battery-powered electric vehicle o nly has a short driving range. To travel for a longer distance, the batteri es are required to be recharged frequently. In this paper, we construct a m odel for a battery-powered electric vehicle, in which driving strategy is t o be obtained such that the total travelling time between two locations is minimized. The problem is formulated as an optimization problem with switch ing times and speed as decision variables. This is an unconventional optimi zation problem. However, by using the control parametrization enhancing tec hnique (CPET), it is shown that this unconventional optimization is equival ent to a conventional optimal parameter selection problem. Numerical exampl es are solved using the proposed method.