Power Estimation and Optimal Work-Charging Scheduling of Construction Electric Vehicles via Mobile Charging Stations

Abstract

Construction electric vehicles (CEVs) are a promising clean alternative to diesel-powered construction equipment, but their adoption is constrained by sparse onsite charging infrastructure, limited CEV mobility, and insufficient understanding of their power consumption. We address these gaps through a field-data-driven framework coupling CEV power estimation with mobile-charging-aware work scheduling. First, using a real-world construction demonstration at the University of California, San Diego, we develop and validate a per-subactivity power estimation model for a compact electric excavator. Manually labeled video is synchronized with coarse battery state-of-charge (SOC) telematics, and constrained nonnegative least squares is used to recover each subactivity's average power consumption. The model predicts held-out test data within $17\%$ normalized mean absolute error (NMAE), and the accompanying dataset is released publicly. Second, leveraging the subactivity power estimates, we formulate a mixed-integer program that jointly optimizes CEV work and charging schedules together with the location, timing, and charging/discharging of mobile charging stations (MCSs) serving the CEVs. The optimization accounts for energy and demand charges, carbon emissions, unmet work penalties, MCS travel, and the physical and operational constraints of the CEVs and MCSs. Across realistic scenarios drawn from the demonstration, the proposed co-optimization attains the lowest operating cost in every case, being $7$--$96\%$ below the best-performing baseline, while solving most instances to proven optimality within an hour. Dataset and scripts are available at https://github.com/ghosh-avik/CEV-MCS-Power-Estimation-and-Joint-Scheduling.