Charging Infrastructure and Pricing Strategy: How to Accommodate Different Perspectives?

The environmental and economic advantages of renewable-energy technologies inspire efforts to encourage the use of electric vehicles (EVs) by business owners and individuals. Large-scale electric mobility is affected by inadequate charging infrastructure and battery technology. This study formulates a bi-level optimization program that aims to minimize the cost of EV charging facility deployment and utilization considering EV users’ travel and charging expenses. A hybrid methodology is developed that (i) converts the proposed formulation into an equivalent single-level formulation, (ii) implements an active-set based technique, and (iii) estimates travel costs using a macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) concept. Numerical experiments on an empirical case study show the performance of the proposed algorithm and some managerial insights. The results are also compared to a benchmark algorithm, which indicate that the proposed methodology can determine near-optimal solutions efficiently.