Electric vehicle charging station placement

Transportation electrification is one of the essential components in the future smart city planning and electric vehicles (EVs) will be integrated into the transportation system seamlessly. Charging stations are the main source of energy for EVs and their locations are critical to the accessibility of EVs in a city. They should be carefully situated so that an EV can access a charging station within its driving range and cruise around anywhere in the city upon being recharged. In this paper, we formulate the Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placement Problem, in which we minimize the total construction cost subject to the constraints for the charging station coverage and the convenience of the drivers for EV charging. We study the properties of the problem, especially its NP-hardness, and propose an efficient greedy algorithm to tackle the problem. We perform a series of simulation whose results show that the greedy algorithm can result in solutions comparable to the mixed-integer programming approach and its computation time is much shorter.