Optimal Decision-Making Method for a Plug-In Electric Taxi in Uncertain Environment

Abstract

This paper studies the optimal decision-making problem for a plug-in electric taxi (PET) in a time-varying complex environment, i.e., a passenger environment, charging station environment, traffic environment, and taxi company management system, in order to maximize PET profit in a short-term operating cycle. First, this problem is formulated as a sequential decision-making problem composed of multiple decision slots. Then, to make the model more practical, the model is divided into two parts: an external environment and an electric taxi model for refinement. The uncertainty and time-varying characteristics of four environmental aspects, including passengers, charging stations, traffic, and taxi company management systems, are analysed and modelled. The transitions between adjacent processes and the environmental feedback of each process are modelled by further subdividing both the serving process and the charging process of the PET into multiple subprocesses, including cruising, carrying passengers, driving to the charging station, queueing before charging, and connecting to the power grid for charging. There are several uncertain factors in the sequential decision-making process for the PET, which leads to difficulty in solving the problem. To address this difficulty, the model-free algorithm SARSA is chosen. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation results.

Keywords

• Plug-in electric taxi
• decision making
• uncertainty
• SARSA algorithm
• load modeling