Strategies for Locating Electric Vehicle Charging Stations in Smart Cities

Electric vehicles represent one of the most promising technological innovations in promoting smart cities and smart transport systems concepts. However, the charging infrastructure is the main drawback to increasing the adoption of electric vehicles. The limited number of charging stations in the cities is an obstacle to the wide adoption of electric vehicles. Therefore, this work proposes to study solutions for the location and installation of charging stations in the context of smart cities. The paper presents three solutions: (i) random, being a naive approach for comparison; (ii) pseudo-random, where the road map is divided into quadrants and a charging station is installed randomly within each quadrant; and (iii) pseudo-greedy, in which the road map is divided into quadrants and the most visited street by vehicles within the quadrant is selected to install a charging station. These approaches are compared using the TAPAS Cologne map and an urban mobility simulator, which considers electric vehicles and charging during their routes.