Bi-Level Programming Approach for Optimal Planning Design of EV Charging Station

This article proposes a new methodological framework to optimize the planning design of an electric vehicle (EV) charging station with renewable energy resources (RCS). Differing from extant studies, the proposed approach explicitly considers the strategic self-interested nature of EV users under a fully liberalized market environment and aims at fully exploiting the flexibility of EV charging loads to enhance the efficiency of renewable energy utilization. Such a problem has been formulated as a bilevel programming model with equilibrium constraints. In this formulation, the upper level problem determines the optimal configuration of the RCS and its operation/pricing schemes simultaneously to maximize the total profits of RCS owner, while the lower level models the strategic charging decisions of EV users in response to the provided pricing scheme of RCS owner. The resulting bilevel optimization model is reformulated into an equivalent single-level linear program, by replacing the lower level problem with Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions and linearizing the bilinear products via McCormick relaxation and Big-M technique. The simulation results from case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.