Energy-Aware Evolutionary Algorithm for Scheduling Jobs of Charging Electric Vehicles in an Autonomous Charging Station

The paper considers an innovative model of autonomous charging stations where a program implementing a scheduling algorithm and a set of jobs being scheduled are driven by the same common power source. It is assumed that one of the well-known local search metaheuristics—an evolutionary algorithm—is used for the scheduling process. The algorithm is designed to search for a sequence of charging jobs resulting in a schedule of the minimum length. Since processors with variable processing speeds can be used for computations, this has interesting consequences both from a theoretical and practical point of view. It is shown in the paper that the problem of choosing the right processor speed under given constraints and an assumed scheduling criterion is a non-trivial one. We formulate a general problem of determining the computation speed of the evolutionary algorithm based on the proposed model of a computational task and the adopted problem of scheduling charging jobs. The novelty of the paper consists of two aspects: (i) proposing the new model of the autonomous charging station operating according to the basics of edge computing; and (ii) developing the methodology for dynamically changing the computational speed, taking into account power and energy constraints as well as the results of computations obtained in the current iteration of the algorithm. Some approaches for selecting the appropriate speed of computations are proposed and discussed. Conclusions and possible directions for future research are also given.