Locating Charging Stations of Various Sizes with Different Numbers of Chargers for Battery Electric Vehicles

Compared with traditional fuel vehicles, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) as a sustainable transportation form can reduce carbon dioxide emissions and save energy, so its market share has great potential. However, there are some problems, such as: Their limited range, long recharging time, and scarce charging facilities, hindering improvement in the market potential of BEVs. Therefore, perfect and efficient charging facility deployment for BEVs is very important. For this reason, the optimal locations for charging stations for BEVs are investigated in this paper. Instead of flow-based formulation, this paper is based on agents under strictly imposed link capacity constraints, where all agents can select their routes and decide on the battery recharging plan without running out of charge. In our study, not only the locations of charging stations, but also the size of charging stations with the different number of chargers, would be taken into consideration. Then, this problem is formulated as a location problem for BEV charging stations of multiple sizes based on agents under link capacity constraints. This problem is referred to as the agent-refueling, multiple-size location problem with capacitated network (ARMSLP-CN). We formulate the ARMSLP-CN as a 0-1 mixed-integer linear program (MILP) with the aim to minimize the total trip time for all agents, including four parts, namely, the travel time, queue time, fixed time for recharging, and variable recharging time depending on the type of charger and the amount of power recharged, in which commercial solvers can solve the linearized model directly. To demonstrate this model, two different numerical instances are designed, and sensitivity analyses are also presented.