Electric vehicle charging strategy study and the application on charging station placement

Abstract

Optimal placement of charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) is critical for providing convenient charging service to EV owners and promoting public acceptance of EVs. There has been a lot of work on EV charging station placement, yet EV drivers’ charging strategy, which plays an important role in deciding charging stations’ performance, is missing. EV drivers make choice among charging stations according to various factors, including the distance, the charging fare and queuing condition in different stations etc. In turn, some factors, like queuing condition, is greatly influenced by EV drivers’ choices. As more EVs visit the same station, longer queuing duration should be expected. This work first proposes a behavior model to capture the decision making of EV drivers in choosing charging stations, based on which an optimal charging station placement model is presented to minimize the social cost (defined as the congestion in charging stations suffered by all EV drivers). Through analyzing EV drivers’ decision-making in the charging process, we propose a k-Level nested Quantal Response Equilibrium charging behavior model inspired by Quantal Response Equilibrium model and level-k thinking model. We then design a set of user studies to simulate charging scenarios and collect data from human players to learn the parameters of different behavior models. Experimental results show that our charging behavior model can better capture the bounded rationality of human players in the charging activity compared with state-of-the-art behavior models. Furthermore, to evaluate the proposed charging behavior model, we formulate the charging station placement problem with it and design an algorithm to solve the problem. It is shown that our approach obtains placement with a significantly better performance to different extent, especially when the budget is limited and relatively low.