Determining efficient placement of electric vehicles charging stations using integer linear programming

This paper proposes an approach for a company to determine the choice of electric stations for its respective electric vehicles so that it would minimize its cost on this process. This approach can not only be applied in this problem but also can be utilized for other scenarios. The core of this method is using integer linear programming to represent “to choose” or “not to choose”. The result will give the corresponding value so that we could identify the orientation for each car. In the thesis, we abstract the problem into dealing with 5 cars going to 5 stations among 7 stations. One car will go to one of the 7 stations and no more than one car can go to the same station. The input data is achieved by calculating the distance from each station to each car. Programming is embodied in investigation to solve the integer linear programming optimization. The chosen region is formulated into a coordinate. The cost is in proportional to distance between cars and stations, so a cost function is demonstrated. Finally, the formula of cost is the product of a matrix and an unknown matrix. In order to minimize the cost, this unknown matrix which represent the choice for each car can be solved. After getting the result, the situation that one station will have different capacity, which will allow people to have more option available will be analyzed. Further evaluation of this type of problem will be discussed to analyze why the outcome of the program will all be zero and one.