Electrical vehicles charging: an optimal control approach via Pontryagin's Maximum Principle

Paper in proceeding, 2025

This study provides a semi-analytical solution to the charging optimization problem for electric vehicles, using Pontryagin's Maximum Principle (PMP) to derive explicit expressions for optimal control and costate trajectories. Such expressions enable much faster trajectory computation than numerical optimization, making this method suitable for larger trip-planning problems. In addition, these explicit expressions reveal the fundamental structure of the optimal solution and how all the parameters and variables affect it, leading to more interpretable results and deeper theoretical insights than fully numerical or black-box methods allow. The method nearly eliminates online computation, while having an average difference with a benchmark solution of about 2.74%.