Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placement Method for Urban Areas

TL;DR

This paper proposes a comprehensive method for urban electric vehicle charging station placement that considers practical factors like voltage regulation and protection upgrades, demonstrating trade-offs and the importance of infrastructure upgrades.

Contribution

It introduces a diversified, convexified optimization framework for urban EV charging station placement that accounts for multiple practical constraints and analyzes their trade-offs.

Findings

The method effectively balances multiple urban system factors.

Convexification preserves problem accuracy with minimal approximation error.

Protection device upgrades are crucial in urban EV infrastructure planning.

Abstract

For accommodating more electric vehicles (EVs) to battle against fossil fuel emission, the problem of charging station placement is inevitable and could be costly if done improperly. Some researches consider a general setup, using conditions such as driving ranges for planning. However, most of the EV growths in the next decades will happen in the urban area, where driving ranges is not the biggest concern. For such a need, we consider several practical aspects of urban systems, such as voltage regulation cost and protection device upgrade resulting from the large integration of EVs. Notably, our diversified objective can reveal the trade-off between different factors in different cities worldwide. To understand the global optimum of large-scale analysis, we add constraint one-by-one to see how to preserve the problem convexity. Our sensitivity analysis before and after convexification shows that our approach is not only universally applicable but also has a small approximation error for prioritizing the most urgent constraint in a specific setup. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the trade-off, the relationship between different factors and the global objective, and the small approximation error. A unique observation in this study shows the importance of incorporating the protection device upgrade in urban system planning on charging stations.