Analysis of logistic plants equipped with wireless charging systems for electric vehicles.

Vehicles electrification is nowadays a valid way to reduce environmental pollution. However, one of the main problems related to battery-powered vehicles is the charging duration. Dynamic charging represents an excellent solution in reducing or even eliminating vehicle downtimes during the recharge. This technology can be efficiently applied to electric forklift trucks and used in logistic plants. Enermove S.r.l. is a company which has developed modular wireless charging units to be installed in warehouse flooring. Their solution can perform both static and dynamic wireless charging. This work aims to formulate a standardized methodology to determine the optimal wireless charging units layout to be installed. In the first part of the thesis, a mathematical-statistical model of the warehouse is proposed, based on the discretization of the operative area and the description of the storage/picking operations executed by the forklifts. Then, in order to find the best possible layout of the charging infrastructures, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem is applied to the discrete warehouse model. The ILP optimal solution must respect some energetic requirements given by the customer and guarantee to be minimal in overall system cost. In the second part of the work, some verification studies have been performed to verify the range of application of the methodology and the validity of the provided results. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to a real-size case study, in order to provide evidence of the ease of usage and reliability of obtained results.