Optimal Paths for Dual Propulsion Vehicles on Real Street Network Graphs

There are several examples of dual propulsion vehicles: hybrid cars, bi-fuel vehicles, electric bikes. Compute a path from a starting point to a destination for these typologies of vehicles requires evaluation of many alternatives. In this paper we develop a mathematical model, able to compute paths for dual propulsion vehicles, that takes in account the power consumption of the two propulsors, the different types of charging, the exchange of energy and, last but not least, the total cost of the path. We focus our attention on electric bikes and we perform several experiments on real street network graph. In our tests we took into account the slope of roads, the recharge in downhill streets and the effort of the cyclist. To validate the model we performed computational tests on properly generated instances set. This set of instances is composed of graphs representing real cities of all around the world. The computational tests show the effectiveness of our approach and its applicability on a real street network.