In a September 2023 interview with the Centre for Science and Environment, Pulkit Khurana, co-founder of battery-swapping solutions provider, Battery Smart, spoke at length about the importance of network optimisation in their business model and how meticulously they predict and plan the movement of their batteries. “Different objectives of the network planning problem itself counteract each other. So, it is a very hard puzzle to solve," he said.
Network optimisation also is the main focus in the electrification of last-mile delivery fleets around the world. In a case study titled Electric vehicles in urban delivery fleets: How far can they go?, researchers from the University of California attempted to solve the routing problem for delivery fleets in Southern California.
The concept of network optimisation is not new. For years, researchers have grappled with designing the most optimal routes for a travelling salesman or a newspaper vendor.
India has a legacy postal system, a vast network of informal recyclers and the near-zero-error network of Mumbai dabbawallahs to learn from. However, each network problem is unique and requires fresh parameters to be considered. But it is a necessary first step in the direction to end-user convenience and efficient utilisation of resources.
The Delhi Transport Department, a state department with one of the largest electric vehicle (EV) penetration rates in India, is also embracing network optimisation to plan the spatial distribution of public EV charging stations in their neighbourhoods.
“In 2023, the global EV market was valued at $255.54 billion. It is forecast to reach around $2,108.8 billion by 2033, growing at a significant Compounded Annual Growth Rate of 23.42 per cent from 2024-33. In May 2024, EV sales in India surged by 20.88 per cent to 1.39 million units,” according to India Brand Equity Foundation.
Sales strategies and EV distribution networks need to be optimised to diversify away from the sudden influx of EVs of one category in one geography. It is important that the charging infrastructure is ready to handle the load of EV sales in a particular locality.
India's EV charging network needs to take into account user density and travel distances to maximise the charger utilisation, just like is required in the travelling salesman problem. The latter is a mathematical setup where the different parameters like time and distance are written together to create equations that ultimately optimise the resource utilisation.
Even though the travelling salesman problem is old and dated and has seen many solutions, what’s new today is the scale of the problem. With almost 927,097 EVs sold in India during January-June 2024 itself, it is important that the scale and challenges of fleet renewal are pre-empted and solved much before they arise.
India needs to invest in computational resources and systems to tackle an upturn of its entire vehicle fleet, which is a massive task but most welcome and necessary.
The preparation would require fiscal investments in the battery passport initiative for data capture, Unified Energy Interface project for data exchange, skilling of network optimisation professionals and database managers for data processing and management, and most of all, robust legislations to protect the personal and sensitive datasets of EV sales and charging networks.