Operating electric taxi fleets: A new dispatching strategy with charging plans

In this paper, we propose a dispatching strategy with charging plans upon the client requests for a commercial fleet of pure electric taxis. To boost the green industry, promoting the development of electrical vehicles is one of the most important policies of many governments. In a new scenario that the commercial taxi fleets run electrical vehicles as the main transportation, traditional dispatching policies for general gasoline taxis are no longer effective. It is because those policies do not need to consider the newly generated issues for the electrical vehicles such as the endurance and the related charging problems when dispatching them. In addition, taxi drivers may doubt whether their working hours would be occupied by the possibly long waiting time of power recharging and thus decrease the chances to carry clients. To overcome the above issues, this paper proposes a new dispatching policy in consideration of the taxi demand, the remaining power of electrical taxis, and the availability of battery charging/switching stations in order to lower the waiting time of power recharging and thus increase the workable hours for taxi drivers. Simulation results show that our dispatching strategy can effectively reduce the waiting time for charging and increase the chances of taking clients compared to some random dispatching strategy.