Optimal placement of charging stations for Electric vehicles in Indian urban networks

With increasing energy consumption, dependency on fossil fuels, increase in carbon foot-prints, a paradigm shift towards sustainable and viable options is necessary. As an effort towards greener technology, the inclusion of electric vehicles and electrification of transportation systems is being encouraged in various countries. The introduction of alternative vehicle technologies in the existing self-contained transportation system poses questions and challenges. Solely expanding the population of EVs in a city without enough road connections and corresponding charging and parking infrastructure will suppress the feasibility of EVs. Thus, supportive charging infrastructure is of utmost priority for large-scale adoption of EV systems. The charging station placement is a complex optimization problem involving power distribution network and road network and thus its solution must superpose the considerations of both the systems. Therefore, in order to find an optimal solution to this problem, multi-stage multi-objective solution approach is followed. Stage I aims at determining the candidate locations based on parameters like voltage stability factor, distance between nodes of traffic and distribution networks and congestion. Furthermore, in stage II optimization of the candidate locations based on cost of installations, penalties, waiting time etc.is carried and trade-off solutions are obtained. Initially, analysis is done on a 25-node transport network superposed on a 33-bus radial distribution network. Thereafter, the proposed model is applied to real urban network. (Chandigarh city)

Features

• Two stage planning model has been laid for the optimal placement of EV charging station.In first stage, candidate locations are found followed by the optimization to get the best results.
• The charging station placement problem is modelled in the context of Indian urban city Chandigarh. The cities will be having large EV users, hence, there will be a necessity of sustainable charging infrastructure.
• This work focuses on placing the EV charging station taking into account both the traffic and electric grid parameters.

Problem formulation

The charging station placement problem is a typical planning problem involving the interaction of both the transport and distribution networks. It is a multifaceted problem with a number of decision variables, objective functions and constraints. In the present work, the charging station placement problem is formulated as a multi-variable multi-objective, non-linear optimization problem. One of the salient features of the multi-objective formulation of this problem is inclusion of cost, penalty and waiting time as the objective functions.

Stage I : Determination of candidate locations for charging station placement

In the first stage, the potential locations for the placement of charging stations is determined using a probabilistic approach based on Bayesian network. We have considered distance of the road network nodes from the nearest bus of the distribution network, congestion and grid stability as the key factors for finding the candidate sites for placing the charging stations.

Stage II : Optimization of candidate locations

The second stage of the proposed methodology involves finding the maximum number of charging stations at the optimal locations. This is formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem with cost, penalties and waiting time at the charging stations as objective functions.

Test Network and Case study

For Test network: 33 bus distribution network is superposed on 25 bus transport network

For Case Study : 69 bus distribution network is superposed on road network of Chandigarh city

Case Study : Chandigarh city

Further references

Report: report.pdf

Powerpoint presentation:Optimal placement of charging stations.pptx