Investigating the adoption of electric vehicles using agent-based model

Abstract

There have been various barriers such as range anxiety, technology resistance, long charging time, lack of infrastructure, uncertainty, safety, and price to mass household adoption of electric vehicles. Technology adoption and diffusion have gained much attention in many applications of agent-based model. This study attempts to investigate the adoption and diffusion of electric vehicles under a various scenarios in an artificial society. This agent-based model incorporates word of mouth effect, socio-demographic information, incentives, and social network effect including threshold model. The adoption and diffusion model of electric vehicles is developed not only to explore heterogeneous agents' behaviors whether or not to make a decision to adopt an electric vehicle based on agent's socio-demographic attributes, driving habit, and gas price, but to provide some measures by sensitivity analysis to help electric vehicle manufactures and policy makers in their decision-making. The preliminary simulation results present agent's decision change over time as a result of interactions among agents and between agents and environment, and suggest that the price of an electric vehicle and gas price are significant factors in the adoption of electric vehicles rather than government financial incentives.