A Systems Approach to Electric Vehicles Charging Station Location Optimization in Singapore

Xu Jing

Abstract

Due to the world’s shortage of petroleum and the heavy pollution from burning them for the cities, seeking alternative energy has become a crucial topic of research. Transportation is the biggest consumer of energy and contributors to air pollution. Electric Vehicles (EVs) is currently the best way to move pollution away from urban areas and electricity can be efficiently transformed from both traditional oil and promising renewable energies like solar energy and tidal energy. As more and more countries start to develop EV technology and make EV a highly economically feasible option for personal transportation, the accessibility of charging of EV becomes critical and urgent issue. Taking Singapore as example, although the batteries that support the electric cars may be charged at home (HDB and Condo) or within residential multi-storey car parks, it is still essential to build special EV charging stations around Singapore to distribute sufficient energy for EVs to keep going. The distribution of charging stations determines EV drivers’ accessibility to energy sources, and consequently affects the EV traffic condition in the road network. This paper covers the following topics:

1. Importance of using analytic hierarchy process to analysis the Singapore situation
2. Finding of a realistic model for charging station placement and achieve an optimal coverage of the resultant infrastructure network.