Associate Professor Enrico Gerding - Intention-aware routing of electric vehicles

Guest speaker A/Prof Enrico Gerding from the Interaction and Complexity (AIC) Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) University of Southampton presented a seminar at rCITI on Thursday 28 April 2016.  

Dr Gerding is an Associate Professor in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity (AIC) research group in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. He has been an academic at Southampton since 2007. He received his PhD from the Dutch National Center of Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in 2004 on the topic of automated negotiation. With around 100 peer-reviewed publications in high quality conferences, journals and books, he has an excellent track record in research on artificial intelligence, specifically the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. This concern’s developing software programs which can make autonomous decisions on behalf of users based on their preferences.

DrGerding presentation introduced a novel intention-aware routing system (IARS) for electric vehicles. A system which enables vehicles to compute a routing policy that minimizes their expected journey time while considering the policies, or intentions, of other vehicles. Considering such intentions is critical for electric vehicles, which may need to recharge en-route and face potentially significant queueing times if other vehicles choose the same charging stations. To address this, the computed routing policy takes into consideration predicted queueing times at the stations, which are derived from the current intentions of other electric vehicles. The efficacy of IARS is demonstrated through simulations using realistic settings based on real data from The Netherlands, including charging station locations, road networks, historical travel times, and journey origin–destination pairs. In these settings, IARS is compared with a number of state-of-the-art benchmark routing algorithms and achieves significantly lower average journey times. In some cases, IARS leads to an over 80% improvement in waiting times at charging stations and a more than 50% reduction in overall journey times.