Extreme-Scale EV Charging Infrastructure Planning for Last-Mile Delivery Using High-Performance Parallel Computing

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable high-performance computing framework for planning large-scale EV charging infrastructure for last-mile delivery, effectively solving extremely large mixed-integer nonlinear problems with billions of variables.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Lagrangian-based dual decomposition method with parallel computing and a heuristic for feasible solutions, enabling solutions to problems previously too large to handle.

Findings

High-quality solutions for large-scale EV charging problems

Significant cost and congestion reductions with combined depot strategies

Framework handles billions of variables where existing methods fail

Abstract

This paper addresses stochastic charger location and allocation problems under queue congestion for last-mile delivery using electric vehicles (EVs). The objective is to decide where to open charging stations and how many chargers of each type to install, subject to budgetary and waiting-time constraints. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer non-linear program, where each station-charger pair is modeled as a multiserver queue with stochastic arrivals and service times to capture the notion of waiting in fleet operations. The model is extremely large, with billions of variables and constraints for a typical metropolitan area; even loading the model in solver memory is difficult, let alone solving it. To address this challenge, we develop a Lagrangian-based dual decomposition framework that decomposes the problem by station and leverages parallelization on high-performance computing systems, where the subproblems are solved by using a cutting plane method and their solutions are collected at the master level. We also develop a three-step rounding heuristic to transform the fractional subproblem solutions into feasible integral solutions. Computational experiments on data from the Chicago metropolitan area with hundreds of thousands of households and thousands of candidate stations show that our approach produces high-quality solutions in cases where existing exact methods cannot even load the model in memory. We also analyze various policy scenarios, demonstrating that combining existing depots with newly built stations under multiagency collaboration substantially reduces costs and congestion. These findings offer a scalable and efficient framework for developing sustainable large-scale EV charging networks.