An Efficient Ant Colony System Approach for New Energy Vehicle Dispatch Problem

As a powerful measure to alleviate greenhouse gas emissions and global warming issue, new energy vehicle (NEV) has aroused extensive attention from the whole society in recent years. In the past few decades, many studies have been conducted on the dispatch of traditional fuel-driven vehicles. As a means of transportation, NEV has the characteristics of fuel-driven vehicles, but the dispatch is different because of its unique refueling manner. With the popularization of NEV, its unique dispatch research is imminent. This paper comprehensively considers electricity and charging piles during the NEV dispatch (NEVD) process. An NEVD framework containing a novel dispatch model is proposed, which elaborates the application service of NEV. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to combine NEVD with service system. Based on the formulated model, an efficient ant colony system (EACS) approach enhanced by pre-selection strategy and local pruning strategy is designed to dispatch NEVs to passengers. Experiments are carried out to investigate the applicable scenarios of ACS-based algorithms. The results verify that the proposed EACS algorithm is an effective and efficient approach to solve the NEVD problem.