Optimal Placement of Fast Charging Infrastructure for Electric Vehicles: an Optimal Routing and Spatial Clustering Approach

The rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) has brought about the need for an efficient and effective charging infrastructure network. Optimal placement of charging infrastructure plays a crucial role in ensuring the widespread adoption and seamless integration of EVs into the existing transportation system. In this work, a new placement method is proposed with the goal of optimizing trip time for all the long-distance nation-wide journeys. The first step of the strategy consists in identifying the ideal location of charging stations based on an optimal routing strategy with charging constraints. Then, a clustering-based heuristic, which also accounts for real travel demand, is proposed to select the best charging stations among these candidate locations. We apply the method to the French national charging infrastructure and we show that important gains in terms of overall trip time and energy consumption are attainable with respect to the current infrastructure. Finally, the proposed method is used to give a recommendation on where to install the future charging stations in order to maximize their positive impact.