Stochastic Model Predictive Control-Based Electric Taxi Fleet Coordination under Solar Power Uncertainty

As electric vehicles (EVs) gradually replace fuel vehicles and provide transportation services in cities, e.g., electric taxi fleets, solar-powered charging stations with energy storage systems have been deployed to provide charging services for EV fleets. The mixture of solar-powered and traditional charging stations brings efficiency challenges to charging stations and reliability challenges to power systems. In this article, we explore e-taxis’ mobility and charging demand flexibility to co-optimize service quality of e-taxi fleets and system cost of charging infrastructures, e.g., solar power under-utilization and reliability issues of power distribution networks due to reverse power flow. We propose SAC, an e-taxi coordination framework to dispatch e-taxis for charging or serving passengers under spatial-temporal dynamics of renewable energy and passenger mobility, which integrates the renewable power generation estimation from a forecast system. Moreover, we extend our design to a stochastic Model Predictive Control problem to handle the uncertainty of solar power generation, aiming to fully utilize generated solar power. Our data-driven evaluation shows that SAC significantly outperforms existing solutions, enhancing the usage rate of solar power by up to 172.6%, while maintaining e-taxi service quality with very small overhead, i.e., reducing the supply-demand ratio by 2.2%.