Solving Optimal Electric Vehicle Charger Deployment Problem

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) have already been acknowledged to be the most viable solution to the climate change that the entire globe has long been combating. Along the same line, it is a salient subject to expand the availability of EV charging infrastructure, which quintessentially necessitates the optimization of the charger’s locations. This paper proposes to formulate the optimal EV charger location problem into a facility location problem (FLP). As an effort to find an efficient method to solve the well-known nonpolynomial deterministic (NP) hard problem, we present a comparative quantification among several representative solving techniques. This paper features two comprehensive case studies representing regions with an average and a high density of EVs. As such, this paper shows that the proposed framework can lead to successful location optimization with adequate refinement of solving techniques.

Keywords

• electric vehicle (EV) charging
• facility location problem (FLP)
• integer program
• optimization solvers
• machine learning