Demand Prediction and Placement Optimization for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

Due to the environmental impact of fossil fuels and high variability in their prices, there is rising interest in adopting electric vehicles (EVs) by both individuals and governments. Despite the advances in vehicle efficiency and battery capacity, a key hurdle is the inherent interdependence between EV adoption and charging station deployment–EV adoption (and hence, charging demand) increases with the availability of charging stations (operated by service providers) and vice versa. Thus, effective placement of charging stations plays a key role in EV adoption. In the placement problem, given a set of candidate sites, an optimal subset needs to be selected with respect to the concerns of both (a) the charging station service provider, such as the demand at the candidate sites and the budget for deployment, and (b) the EV user, such as charging station reachability and short waiting times at the station. This work addresses these concerns, making the following three novel contributions: (i) a supervised multi-view learning framework using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) for demand prediction at candidate sites, using multiple datasets such as points of interest information, traffic density, and the historical usage at existing charging stations; (ii) a “mixed-packing-and-covering” optimization framework that models competing concerns of the service provider and EV users, which is also extended to optimize government grant allocation to multiple service providers; (iii) an iterative heuristic to solve these problems by alternately invoking knapsack and set cover algorithms. The performance of the demand prediction model and the placement optimization heuristic are evaluated using real world data. In most cases, and especially when budget is scarce, our heuristic achieves an improvement of 10-20% over a naive heuristic, both in finding feasible solutions and maximizing demand.