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- All Subjects: Electric Vehicles
- Creators: Mirchandani, Pitu B.
- Creators: Askin, Ronald
Lithium ion batteries are quintessential components of modern life. They are used to power smart devices — phones, tablets, laptops, and are rapidly becoming major elements in the automotive industry. Demand projections for lithium are skyrocketing with production struggling to keep up pace. This drive is due mostly to the rapid adoption of electric vehicles; sales of electric vehicles in 2020 are more than double what they were only a year prior. With such staggering growth it is important to understand how lithium is sourced and what that means for the environment. Will production even be capable of meeting the demand as more industries make use of this valuable element? How will the environmental impact of lithium affect growth? This thesis attempts to answer these questions as the world looks to a decade of rapid growth for lithium ion batteries.
The major emphasis in this dissertation is the development of theories and associated algorithms for a new set of location problems defined on continuous network space related to siting multiple RPs for range limited vehicles.
This dissertation covers three optimization problems: locating multiple RPs on a line network, locating multiple RPs on a comb tree network, and locating multiple RPs on a general tree network. For each of the three problems, finding the minimum number of RPs needed to refuel all Origin-Destination (O-D) flows is considered as the first objective. For this minimum number, the location objective is to locate this number of RPs to minimize weighted sum of the travelling distance for all O-D flows. Different exact algorithms are proposed to solve each of the three algorithms.
In the first part of this dissertation, the simplest case of locating RPs on a line network is addressed. Scenarios include single one-way O-D pair, multiple one-way O-D pairs, round trips, etc. A mixed integer program with linear constraints and quartic objective function is formulated. A finite dominating set (FDS) is identified, and based on the existence of FDS, the problem is formulated as a shortest path problem. In the second part, the problem is extended to comb tree networks. Finally, the problem is extended to general tree networks. The extension to a probabilistic version of the location problem is also addressed.