Optimal Deployment of Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles: A Formal Approach

Electric Vehicle (EV) is a great innovation of the modern automobile industry. Due to its attractive cost-efficient features and a growing worldwide environmental awareness, the number of EV purchases is growing at an increasing rate day by day. As the price of EVs is expected to drop in the near future, a large number of new EVs will hit the road consequently. However, our current infrastructure is not capable of supporting this growing number of EVs. We need sufficient number of charging stations, placed optimally across an area, to recharge the EVs in a reasonable amount of time. In this paper, we present a formal framework to optimally deploy charging stations for EVs in a given area. The framework designs this verification as a constraint satisfaction problem where the goal is to optimally place the charging stations, with a sufficient number of charging outlets at each station, to serve all EVs in a given area while satisfying the limited budget and other system constraints. We evaluate the proposed framework for its analysis capability as well as its scalability by performing simulation on different synthetic test cases.