Transportation-enabled coordinated scheduling of multi-microgrids using heavy-duty electric trucks as mobile battery carriers

High renewable penetration in spatially distributed multi-microgrid systems can lead to simultaneous renewable curtailment and load shedding because local storage mitigates temporal mismatches but cannot fully resolve spatial energy imbalance among weakly interconnected nodes. This problem is particularly relevant to highway service-area microgrids, where electrical interconnections may be limited while heavy-duty electric trucks provide an inherent transportation resource. This paper proposes a transportation-enabled coordinated scheduling framework in which standardized battery modules are transported by heavy-duty electric trucks and used as mobile energy carriers for cross-node energy redistribution. A sequentially coupled two-stage optimization method is developed to coordinate intra-microgrid dispatch and inter-microgrid battery transportation. In the first stage, microgrid dispatch identifies renewable surplus and load deficit profiles. In the second stage, a Recoverable Curtailment Time Window mechanism converts continuous surplus–deficit energy profiles into time-dependent battery supply and demand capacities. The resulting transportation problem is formulated as a pickup-and-delivery model for routing and scheduling optimization. Case studies on a four-node highway service-area multi-microgrid system show that the proposed method reduces renewable curtailment by up to 19.1% and load shedding by up to 79.4% compared with independent dispatch. Results further indicate that transportation-enabled battery exchange effectively supports cross-regional energy redistribution and improves renewable utilization. Sensitivity analysis further reveals that system performance depends on the matching relationship between transportation frequency and battery capacity. The proposed framework provides a practical pathway for improving renewable energy utilization and supply reliability in spatially distributed microgrid systems without extensive grid expansion.