A planning strategy considering multiple factors for electric vehicle charging stations along German motorways

Abstract An electric vehicle (EV) charging station planning strategy, considering the construction cost and drivers’ satisfaction, is proposed in this paper. All German motorway pathways and an hourly based resolution traffic flows are collected, and the existing service areas on motorways are presented as potential locations for charging infrastructure. Close service areas are clustered and the optimal positions of charging stations are calculated for each cluster. The charging station construction cost, EV drivers waiting cost as well as the EV inconvenient driving cost are defined. By considering the different types of cost mentioned above synthetically, a planning method that can satisfy the charging demand while reducing the construction cost is proposed. In addition, three different planning scenarios to meet different planning requirements have been proposed. The established optimization problem is a mixed-integer non-linear (MINLP) problem and an improved approach based on genetic algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. Results verify the efficacy of the proposed method.