Optimal Control of a Non-Stationary Inventory-Queue, with Applications to EV-Battery Swapping
Abstract
We study a non-stationary queueing system with multiple parallel servers and a finite buffer capacity, over a finite planning horizon. Motivated by an operation that is central to an EV (electric vehicle) battery-swapping station -- how to best manage the charging of batteries swapped off from EVs, we develop a continuous-time MDP (Markov decision process) approach to the problem. The main technical challenge is to allow both the arrival rate and the service-cost rate to be functions of time with jumps at discrete time points, key features of the EV swapping station's operation. We derive an exact and explicit threshold structure that characterizes the optimal control policy. Moreover, we give conditions under which the thresholds are monotone over time, and with respect to key system parameters such as service and buffer capacities. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to supplement as well as validate the theoretical results, and also to illustrate the robustness of the threshold structure in practical implementations.
Related
- Towards Optimal Inventory Control under Censored Demand: A Biased Sample-Average Approximation Approach
- Solution to a fully coupled McKean-Vlasov forward-backward stochastic difference equation and applications to optimal control with law-delay
- Optimal Holding Times for Entanglement Swapping
- Inventory Policies with Returns and Demand Uncertainty: Optimal, Fixed-Quantity, and Order Cancellation Models
- Disjunctive Submodular Functions: Envelopes and Applications to Inventory and 0-1 Quadratic Optimization
BibTeX
@misc{cheng2026optimal,
title = {{Optimal Control of a Non-Stationary Inventory-Queue, with Applications to EV-Battery Swapping}},
author = {Hanyu Cheng and David Yao},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.35153},
eprint = {2609.35153},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35153},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Optimal Control of a Non-Stationary Inventory-Queue, with Applications to EV-Battery Swapping
AU - Hanyu Cheng
AU - David Yao
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.35153
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35153
AB - We study a non-stationary queueing system with multiple parallel servers and a finite buffer capacity, over a finite planning horizon. Motivated by an operation that is central to an EV (electric vehicle) battery-swapping station -- how to best manage the charging of batteries swapped off from EVs, we develop a continuous-time MDP (Markov decision process) approach to the problem. The main technical challenge is to allow both the arrival rate and the service-cost rate to be functions of time with jumps at discrete time points, key features of the EV swapping station's operation. We derive an exact and explicit threshold structure that characterizes the optimal control policy. Moreover, we give conditions under which the thresholds are monotone over time, and with respect to key system parameters such as service and buffer capacities. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to supplement as well as validate the theoretical results, and also to illustrate the robustness of the threshold structure in practical implementations.
ER -