Placement of Energy Sources for Electric Transportation in Smart Cities

The raising concerns of energy consumption and air pollution advance the development of electric vehicle technologies and promote the increased deployment of Electric Vehicles (EVs) towards electric transportation. The increasing number of EVs on the road network leads to a growing challenge of electricity management for the power grid to promptly supply electricity to EVs. In order to address this challenge, we need to carefully plan the energy sources and energy delivery via charging facilities to EVs, taking into consideration interdependencies between roads/transportation and electric grid. In this paper, we focus on studying the placement of energy sources and their charging facilities for EVs by developing a 2-stage planning process. We study the placement of two types of charging facilities: charging stations and dynamic wireless charging pads. The first stage of the planning process is to determine the optimal locations for placing the charging facilities to serve the maximum amount of EVs on the road network. Given the selected optimal locations, the second stage is to determine the capacity of the charging service locations with the purpose of minimizing the total waiting time of EV drivers across the road network to charge their EVs. We show the effectiveness of the 2-stage planning process on a sample road network during our performance evaluation.