Optimal Installation for Electric Vehicle Wireless Charging Lanes

Range anxiety, the persistent worry about not having enough battery power to complete a trip, remains one of the major obstacles to widespread electric-vehicle adoption. As cities look to attract more users to adopt electric vehicles, the emergence of wireless in-motion car charging technology presents itself as a solution to range anxiety. For a limited budget, cities could face the decision problem of where to install these wireless charging units. With a heavy price tag, an installation without a careful study can lead to inefficient use of limited resources. In this work, we model the installation of wireless charging units as an integer programming problem. We use our basic formulation as a building block for different realistic scenarios, carry out experiments using real geospatial data, and compare our results to different heuristics. Reproducibility: all datasets, algorithm implementations and mathematical programming formulation presented in this work are available at https://github.com/hmwesigwa/smartcities.git