Data-driven layout design of regional battery swapping stations for electric bicycles

This paper studies the layout of battery swapping stations for electric bicycles in a community. The problem is first formulated as a nonlinear mathematic programming model. A simulated annealing based algorithm is applied to solve this problem. On the other hand, based on the number of electric bicycles in each apartment facility of the community, a coordinate based heuristic is adopted to locate the battery swapping stations. Then a simulation model is constructed based on Anylogic to allocate batteries to each battery swapping station. The objective is to maximize the utilization of the battery swapping stations while minimizing the customer waiting time for available batteries. A comparison study is conducted with respect to the SA based method and the heuristic based simulation optimization approach, and it is revealed that the total cost of the two methods are close, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the data-driven method. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.