Locating charging stations for electric vehicles

The insufficient charging infrastructure greatly obstructs the development of the electric vehicle(EV) industry. How to efficiently deploy charging stations in a city becomes an urgent problem for the local government. Previous refueling location models are not suitable for fulfilling the EVs' charging demand. This paper proposes a location model for charging stations based on the characteristics of travel behaviors of urban residents. The model consists of two parts: one for short distance commuters which utilize slow charging (SC) facilities, and the other for long distance travelers which utilize fast recharging (FR) facilities. It aims to harness limited resource to meet as much as possible charging demand for both parking vehicles and vehicles on long journeys. A typical city of China is used as an example to demonstrate the implementation and results of the model. We employed sensitive analyses to search for specific factors having strong impact on the number and location of charging stations. It is suggested that travel distance and locating capacity will greatly affect the final result.