Charging facility allocation in smart cities

The raising concerns of energy consumption and air pollution advance the development of electric vehicle technologies and promote the increased deployment of Electric Vehicles (EVs) towards electric transportation. The increasing number of EVs on the road network leads to a growing challenge of electricity management for the power grid to promptly supply electricity to EVs. In order to address this challenge, we need to carefully plan the energy sources and energy delivery via charging facilities to EVs, taking into consideration interdependencies between roads/transportation and electric grid. In this thesis, we focus on studying the placement of energy sources and their charging facilities for EVs by developing: 1) an extended Flow Refueling Location model which finds optimal locations for charging stations as well as dynamic wireless charging pads, and 2) a 2-stage planning process for placement of charging station. The first stage of the planning process is to determine the optimal locations for placing the charging stations to serve the maximum amount of EVs on the road network. Given the selected optimal locations, the second stage determines the capacity of the charging service locations with the purpose of minimizing the total waiting time of EV drivers across the road network to charge their EVs. We show the effectiveness of these two planning models on a sample road network during our performance evaluation

Efficient heuristic algorithms for location of charging stations in electric vehicle routing problems

Indexación: Scopus.This work has been partially supported by CONICYT FONDECYT by grant 11150370, FONDEF IT17M10012 and the “Grupo de Logística y Transporte” at the Universidad del Bío-Bío.. This support is gratefully acknowledged.Eco-responsible transportation contributes at making a difference for companies devoted to product delivery operations. Two specific problems related to operations are the location of charging stations and the routing of electric vehicles. The first one involves locating new facilities on potential sites to minimise an objective function related to fixed and operational opening costs. The other one, electric vehicle routing problem, involves the consolidation of an electric-type fleet in order to meet a particular demand and some guidelines to optimise costs. It is determined by the distance travelled, considering the limited autonomy of the fleet, and can be restored by recharging its battery. The literature provides several solutions for locating and routing problems and contemplates restrictions that are closer to reality. However, there is an evident lack of techniques that addresses both issues simultaneously. The present article offers four solution strategies for the location of charging stations and a heuristic solution for fleet routing. The best results were obtained by applying the location strategy at the site of the client (relaxation of the VRP) to address the routing problem, but it must be considered that there are no displacements towards the recharges. Of all the other three proposals, K-means showed the best performance when locating the charging stations at the centroid of the cluster. © 2012-2018. National Institute for R and D in Informatics.https://sic.ici.ro/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Art.-8-Issue-1-2018-SIC.pd

Charging ahead on the transition to electric vehicles with standard 120 v wall outlets

Electrification of transportation is needed soon and at significant scale to meet climate goals, but electric vehicle adoption has been slow and there has been little systematic analysis to show that today's electric vehicles meet the needs of drivers. We apply detailed physics-based models of electric vehicles with data on how drivers use their cars on a daily basis. We show that the energy storage limits of today's electric vehicles are outweighed by their high efficiency and the fact that driving in the United States seldom exceeds 100 km of daily travel. When accounting for these factors, we show that the normal daily travel of 85-89% of drivers in the United States can be satisfied with electric vehicles charging with standard 120 V wall outlets at home only. Further, we show that 77-79% of drivers on their normal daily driving will have over 60 km of buffer range for unexpected trips. We quantify the sensitivities to terrain, high ancillary power draw, and battery degradation and show that an extreme case with all trips on a 3% uphill grade still shows the daily travel of 70% of drivers being satisfied with electric vehicles. These findings show that today's electric vehicles can satisfy the daily driving needs of a significant majority of drivers using only 120 V wall outlets that are already the standard across the United States