Optimal Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placement as a Congestion Game Problem

We propose an optimization method to place electric vehicle charging stations to minimize total travel time, thereby minimizing additional congestion and detours caused by the chargers. For a tractable optimization scheme, we frame the drivers' route choices as a congestion game that allows us to find equilibrium flows for each candidate set of locations. Our contribution has two primary components. First, we refine the modeling of driver cost functions to account for charging needs as well as travel time, and introduce different agent types based on their unique valuations of charging benefits. Second, we address the exponential growth of the search space of charger locations with a greedy optimization approach. We demonstrate with numerical experiments that: (i) the congestion game formulation allows us to efficiently compute equilibrium flows for each candidate charger placement; (ii) the greedy approach can closely approximate the optimal selection.