Establishing a statewide electric vehicle charging station network in Maryland: A corridor-based station location problem

In this paper, we apply an optimization-based approach to locate electric vehicle (EV) fast charging stations that prioritize the deployment of stations considering the designated EV corridors. A designated corridor is a segment of a highway selected for EV charging infrastructure deployment to increase the adoption of EVs. We formulate the problem such that candidate charging stations on corridors are prioritized over the other candidate station locations outside the corridor. We also introduce two new objective functions based on corridor-utilizing and corridor-weighted traffic flow concept and a new constraint that primarily focuses on the corridor building. These new objectives fit better for enabling EV corridors when the underlying objective is to locate chargers along these corridors with high density. We conduct numerical experiments using the Maryland highway network, major population centers, and select EV corridors as input. Experiment results suggest that the traditionally used objectives in the literature, maximizing traffic flow and maximizing vehicle-miles traveled (VMT), may not be well-suited for corridor building. However, a corridor-focused objective function causes the removal of many O-D pairs from consideration; hence, its impact on the overall EV flow refueled is significant as well. Experiment results also indicate that corridor prioritization is crucial for selecting a solution with more stations on corridors.