Distributing Fast EV Charging Stations in Saudi Highways

Abstract

With the leaps and strides Saudi Arabia has been making in recent years, and its clear interest in making Saudi Arabia more dependent on Electric Vehicles taking form in the green initiative of the Saudi 2030 Vision. In this paper, a model that locates and distributes fast charging EV stations (FCS) among the highways connecting the major cities in Saudi Arabia and plan the most ideal distribution of stations is created using methods from Industrial Engineering. The first problem is determining the charging station's locations on a certain highway. The second problem is deciding how many charging stations will be placed in every specific location considering the parameters of each. For this study, the model is applied on the Jeddah-Riyadh-Dammam highway crossing the most important cities of Saudi Arabia. For the methodology, 15 locations are located along this route. For each location, the Criteria Priority Weight system (CPWS), a system used to calculate the composite weight of each location, is applied. Finally, we will apply our mathematical model with the set parameters to find the maximum user utility score, which corresponds to the optimal distribution of EV chargers upon the locations. The results yield a certain distribution of charging stations in those locations under budget, cost, and capacity constraints.