Electric Vehicle Charging Scheduling by an Enhanced Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

Scheduling the charging times of a large fleet of Electric Vehicles (EVs) may be a hard problem due to the physical structure and conditions of the charging station. In this paper, we tackle an EV's charging scheduling problem derived from a charging station designed to be installed in community parking where each EV has its own parking lot. The main goals are to satisfy the user demands and at the same time to make the best use of the available power. To solve the problem, we propose an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm enhanced with local search and some mating strategies borrowed from genetic algorithms. The proposal is analyzed experimentally by simulation and compared with other methods previously proposed for the same problem. The results of the experimental study provided interesting insights about the problem and showed that the proposed algorithm is quite competitive with previous methods.