A stochastic model for the design of electric vehicle charging infrastructure

International audienceWe study the problem of designing electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure. The main decision that we consider is the location of the charging stations in a way that EV drivers can drive along the road network without running out of charge. We take into account the uncertainty of the driving range, which is the maximum distance that a fully charged EV can travel before its battery runs empty. We thus propose a stochastic model and maximize the expected coverage of the recharging demand. We first formulate a new mixed-integer linear program (MILP) for the stochastic problem and compare it with a previously published one. We then develop a Tabu search heuristic method to solve large-size instances of the problem. We carry out our numerical experiments using randomly generated road networks and we show the performance of the new formulation as well as the quality of the solutions provided by the Tabu search heuristic approach