Spatial and Temporal Charging Infrastructure Planning Using Discrete Event Simulation

Abstract

The switch from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs) is an important step to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To this end, many European countries announced EV stock targets, e.g., Germany aims to have one million EVs on the roads by 2020. To achieve these goals and to handle the range limitation of EVs, a widespread publicly accessible charging infrastructure is needed. This paper provides a dynamic spatial and temporal simulation model for the building of charging infrastructure on a municipality scale. We evaluate empirical data about the timely utilization of different charging stations in the German federal state of Bavaria. This data is used to derive empirical models for the start time and duration of charging events as well as the popularity of charging stations. We develop a lightweight discrete event simulation model which can be used to investigate different expansion strategies, e.g., based on the load of charging stations or the number of successful and failed charging attempts. We show the applicability of our model using the German federal state of Bavaria as a use case.