In January, 2020, the research paper of Zhixiong Luo entitled “Joint deployment of charging stations and photovoltaic power plants for electric vehicles” was accepted by Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment. 

Highlights:

• Simultaneously design charging stations, PV plants, and time-dependent charging fee.

• An extend label-setting algorithm to solve EV joint routing and charging problem.

• Traffic equilibrium with approximated charging station queuing time.

• Optimal power flow with PV plants to serve EV charging needs.

• Parallel surrogate-based optimization to solve the design problem.

Abstract:

The focus of this study is to jointly design charging stations and photovoltaic (PV) power plants with time-dependent charging fee, to improve the management of the coupled transportation and power systems. We first propose an efficient and extended label-setting algorithm to solve the EV joint routing and charging problem that considers recharging amount choices at different stations and loop movement cases. Then, a variational inequality problem is formulated to model the equilibrium of EV traffic on transportation networks, and an optimal power flow model is proposed to model the power network flow with PV power plants and optimally serve the EV charging requirements. Based on the above models for describing system states, we then formulate a model to simultaneously design charging stations, PV plants, and time-dependent charging fee. A surrogate-based optimization (SBO) algorithm is adopted to solve the model. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed SBO algorithm performs well. Additionally, important insights concerning the infrastructure design and price management of the coupled transportation and power networks are derived accordingly.