On Using Metaheuristics for the Allocation of Electric Vehicles to Charging Stations

In this article, we present a comprehensive study regarding the problem of allocating a fleet of electric vehicles to charging stations according to charging time and battery constraints. Each charging station's capacity as well as the necessary charging time is known in advance while each vehicle's arrival time is provided by a GPS device. We provide an integer programming model solved with an exact method to effectively handle this combinatorial problem along with a set of metaheuristic algorithms. To evaluate the performance of this solution framework, computational experiments are conducted on large-scale randomly generated instances simulating a real-world scenario.