Numerical Study on Planning Inductive Charging Infrastructures for Electric Service Vehicles on Airport Aprons

Abstract

Dynamic inductive charging is a contact-free technology to provide electric vehicles with energy while they are in motion, thus eliminating the need to conductively charge the batteries of those vehicles and, hence, the required vehicle downtimes. Airport aprons of commercial airports are potential systems to employ this charging technology to reduce aviation-induced CO2 emissions. To date, many vehicles operating on airport aprons are equipped with internal combustion engines burning diesel fuel, hence contributing to CO2 emissions and the global warming problem. However, airport aprons exhibit specific features that might make dynamic inductive charging technologies particularly interesting. It turns out that using this technology leads to some strategic infrastructure design questions for airport aprons about the spatial allocation of the required system components. In this paper, we experimentally analyze these design questions to explore under which conditions we can expect the resulting mathematical optimization problems to be relatively hard or easy to be solved, respectively, as well as the achievable solution quality. To this end, we report numerical results on a large-scale numerical study reflecting different types of spatial structures of terminals and airport aprons as they can be found at real-world airports.