Operating a Fleet of Electric Taxis

OPERATING A FLEET OF ELECTRIC TAXIS
´ ´ BERNAT GACIAS AND FREDERIC MEUNIER

Abstract. The deployment of electric taxi fleets is highly desirable from a sustainable point of view. Nevertheless, the weak autonomy of this kind of vehicles requires a careful operation. The way of managing such a fleet and the question of locating charging terminals for the vehicles are addressed in this paper. Methods for dealing with these tasks are proposed and their efficiency is proved through simulations.

1. Introduction 1.1. Context. Centrale OO 1 is a pioneering project aiming to deploy in Paris a fleet of 100 % electric taxis. The company in charge of the management of the fleet is the Soci´t´ du Taxi Electrique Parisien (STEP). ee The deployment of such fleets finds is main motivation in sustainable issues: electric vehicles release almost no air pollutants at the place where they are operated and have less noise pollution than internal combustion engine vehicles. However, the main drawback of an electric vehicle is its weak autonomy – 80 km in the case of the Centrale OO project. In taxi fleet management, two kinds of requests can be differentiated: booking requests and opportunistic requests. The first ones can be immediate or in advance of travel and have to be processed by the taxi dispatching system which assigns the request to a taxi. The opportunistic requests correspond to the traditional taxi services picking up passengers at cab-ranks or from the side of the road. Of course, this kind of requests is not processed by the dispatching system. The constraints of the management, as expressed by the STEP, are • A taxi must never break down • An opportunistic demand inside Paris and its suburbs must always be satisfied (legal environment of Paris) • The number of booking demands accepted has to be maximized The charging problem of the taxis must therefore be carefully addressed. At a tactical level, a good assignment of the trips to the taxis is crucial. We propose an efficient way

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