Charging Station Planning for Plug-In Electric Vehicles

A novel model for the charging station planning problem of plug-in electric vehicles is proposed in this paper considering the users’ daily travel. With the objective of minimizing the total cost, including the charging stations’ cost (including installing cost and management cost) and the users’ cost (including station access cost and charging cost), the proposed model simultaneously handles the problems where to locate the charging stations and how many chargers to be established in each charging station. Considering that different users may have different perception of station access cost and charging cost, two cases (i.e., homogeneous users and heterogeneous users) are typically investigated. The impacts of different discount rates, operating period of the charging stations, number of electric vehicles and number of charging stations on the location of the charging station are also studied. The simulation results not only show that it is very important to locate the charging stations according to the traveling behavior of users, but also verify the validity of the proposed model.