Planning Strategy for an Electric Vehicle Fast Charging Service Provider in a Competitive Environment

Fast charging is a promising method of energy refueling for electric vehicles (EVs), significantly shortening the refueling time to a level comparable with traveling and queuing times, which consequently will highly influence the decision of charging places for EV users. Multiple charging service providers (CSPs) are participating in the investment of EV fast charging facilities, inevitably bringing competition among each other, which affects the planning decision of investors. This article studies the planning strategy of EV fast charging infrastructure in a competitive environment, taking the queuing impacts on EV users into consideration. A double-loop iterative methodology is proposed, and the outer loop seeks the equilibrium point of the CSP’s planning schemes. A user equilibrium traffic assignment model integrated with queuing theory and an adaptive route selection algorithm are built in the inner loop to optimize the planning scheme of a CSP, along with a station-level linear programming model to obtain the optimal sizes and operation scheduling of on-site energy storage systems (ESSs) considering time-of-use prices and investment constraints. Case studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and reveal that ignoring the competitors’ response will cause overestimation of the CSP’s attracted charging demands and its total benefits.