An EV Charging Station Placement for Ride-hailing Service: from Big Data Networking Perspective

The charging station is an important supporting infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs), and its placement will directly affect the development of the whole industry chain of EVs. Although many studies have investigated the placement of EV from the distributions of EVs, few works investigate the charging station placement in a ride-hailing service provider perspective. As a ride-hailing service provider, it does not only provide the ride-hailing service, but also the power supply for hailing vehicles for the purpose of cost saving. In this paper, the charging station placement for a ride-hailing service provider has been studied from networking perspective. Inspired by the cache placement problem in content distribution networking (CDN), the charging station is analogous to the cache server, and its placement is designed according to the access frequency and the demand for content, namely, electricity, aiming at enabling more users to complete the charging behavior nearby. Both hotspot path and EVs’ energy demand and consumption are considered to tackle the placement of charging stations. Finally, we use hit rate and distance cost as metrics to evaluate the performance of placement of charging stations. The evaluation results confirm the superiority and feasibility of the proposed scheme.