Vehicular energy network (VEN) is a vehicular network which can transport energy over a large geographical area by means of electric vehicles (EVs). In the near future, an abundance of EVs, plentiful generation of the renewables, and mature wireless energy transfer and vehicular communication technologies will expedite the realization of VEN. To transmit energy from a source to a destination, we need to establish energy paths, which are composed of segments of vehicular routes, while satisfying various design objectives. In this paper, we develop a method to construct all energy paths for a particular energy source-destination pair, followed by some analytical results of the method. We describe how to utilize the energy paths to develop optimization models for different design goals and propose two solutions. We also develop a heuristic for the power loss minimization problem. We compare the performance of the three solution methods with artificial and real-world traffic networks and provide a comprehensive comparison in terms of solution quality, computation time, solvable problem size, and applicability. This paper lays the foundations of VEN routing.
Mobile electrical grid (or called EV energy network) proposed in @cite_7 has a similar but different design as VEN. It does make use of EVs for energy transmission and distribution but it requires the involved EVs to actively participate in the energy transmission process by stopping at particular locations for charging and discharging. However, with dynamic (dis)charging technologies, VEN can function transparently to the EV drivers. In @cite_0 , we provided an extensive analytical framework for further performance study of VEN.
@cite_0 @cite_7
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The smart grid spawns many innovative ideas, but many of them cannot be easily integrated into the existing power system due to power system constraints, such as the lack of capacity to transport renewable energy in remote areas to the urban centers. An energy delivery system can be built upon the traffic network and electric vehicles (EVs) utilized as energy carriers to transport energy over a large geographical region. A generalized architecture called the vehicular energy network (VEN) is constructed and a mathematically tractable framework is developed. Dynamic wireless (dis)charging allows electric energy, as an energy packet, to be added and subtracted from EV batteries seamlessly. With proper routing, energy can be transported from the sources to destinations through EVs along appropriate vehicular routes. This paper gives a preliminary study of VEN. Models are developed to study its operational and economic feasibilities with real traffic data in U. K. This paper shows that a substantial amount of renewable energy can be transported from some remote wind farms to London under some reasonable settings and VEN is likely to be profitable in the near future. VEN can complement the power network and enhance its power delivery capability. Vehicle-to-grid provides a viable approach that feeds the battery energy stored in electric vehicles (EVs) back to the power grid. Meanwhile, since EVs are mobile, the energy in EVs can be easily transported from one place to another. Based on these two observations, we introduce a novel concept called EV energy network for energy transmission and distribution using EVs. We present a concrete example to illustrate the usage of an EV energy network, and then study the optimization problem of how to deploy energy routers in an EV energy network. We prove that the problem is NP-hard and develop a greedy heuristic solution. Simulations using real-world data shows that our method is efficient.