Exact Approach for Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Location: A Real Case Study in Malaga, Spain

This article presents an exact approach for solving the problem of locating electric vehicle charging stations in a city, whose goal is upon minimizing the distance citizens must span to charge their vehicles. Mixed integer programming formulations are presented for two variants of the problem: relaxed (i.e., without considering electrical constraints for the infrastructure) and full versions. The experimental evaluation is performed over a real-world case study defined in Malaga, Spain. Results show that the proposed approach can deal with the large number of variables (i.e., millions) of the problem, computing optimal solutions for all problem instances and variants addressed. The improvements in solutions quality over a previous metaheuristic approach applied to the same problem and application case are notorious.