Planning Plug-in Electrical Vehicles Charging Infrastructure in City Centers

摘要

Installing charging facilities in existing parking lots in city centers is considered an effective measure to encourage the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEV). This paper is concerned with the problem of optimally locating these facilities to minimize the total system cost. The problem is formulated as a fixed charge facility location model with charging capacity constraints. Our model extends the existing work by allowing unserved demands and considering drivers’ tendency to stick to familiar parking lots. Accordingly, inconvenience costs are introduced for unserved demands and for those who have to change their parking lots for the purpose of charging. The proposed model is not only always feasible, but also introduces a pricing mechanism so that the level of service (measured by the cost of unserved demands) can be traded off with infrastructure cost. In addition, a stochastic version of the proposed model is developed to address the effects of uncertain PEV market penetration rate on the design of charging facilities. A case study is conducted to analyze the sensitivity of the models to different cost components, and to compare the results of the stochastic and deterministic models.