Electric vehicle charging stations’ location in urban transportation networks: A heuristic methodology

The lack of public charging infrastructure has been one of the main barriers preventing the technological transition from traditional vehicles to electric vehicles. To accelerate this technological transition, it is necessary to elaborate optimal charging station location strategies to increase the user confidence, and maintain investment costs within acceptable levels. However, the existing works for this purpose are often based on multipath considerations or multi-objective functions, that result in taxing computational efforts for urban transportation networks. This article presents a heuristic methodology for urban transportation networks, that considers the deployment of the charging stations for coverage purposes, and the fulfilment of user preferences and constraints as two separated processes. In this methodology, a Reallocation Algorithm is formulated to prioritize the selection of Locations of Interest, and to reduce the number of stations with overlapping covering areas. The methodology results are compared to those drawn from a Greedy Algorithm based on a multipath consideration, in an extensive metropolitan transportation network. The results show that the proposed methodology significantly reduce the computational time required for solving the location problem, and furthermore, allows for similar results to those obtained when considering k = 2 and k = 3 deviation paths.