Joint power distribution and charging network design for electrified mobility with user equilibrium decisions

Abstract

AbstractRapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) requires the development of a highly flexible charging network. The design and management of the charging infrastructure for EV‐dominated transportation systems are intertwined with power grid operations both economically and technically. High penetration of EVs in the future can increase the charging loads and cause a wide range of operational issues in power distribution networks (PDNs). This paper aims to design an EV charging network with an embedded PDN layout to account for energy dispatch and underlying traffic flows in urban transportation networks supporting electric mobility in the near future. A mixed‐integer bilevel model is proposed with the EV charging facility location and PDN energy decisions in the upper level and user equilibrium traffic assignment in the lower level considering an uncertain charging demand. The objective is to minimize the cost of PDN operations, charging facility deployments, and transportation. The proposed problem is solved using a column and constraint generation (C&CG ) algorithm, while a macroscopic fundamental diagram concept is implemented to estimate the arc travel times. The methodology is applied to a hypothetical and two real‐world case study networks, and the solutions are compared to a Benders decomposition benchmark. The east‐coast analysis results indicate a 77.3% reduction in the computational time. Additionally, the benchmark technique obtains an optimality gap of 1.15%, while the C&CG algorithm yields a 0.61% gap. The numerical experiments show the robustness of the proposed methodology. Besides, a series of sensitivity analyses has been conducted to study the impact of input parameters on the proposed methodology and draw managerial insights.