Charging infrastructure planning for electric vehicles in giant cities

With the rapid exhaustion of fossil energy, electric vehicles (EVs) become one of the key candidates for the next generation of transportation. Increasingly perfect technology developed makes EVs grow significantly. Therefore, Charging Stations (CSs), as accessories and necessities of EVs, should form a network with optimal planning. Inappropriate CS network design could cause series of negative effects to the popularization of EVs, the layout of the city traffic network and the financial cost of CS network construction, etc. Besides, the charging infrastructure planning for cities with large population and high EV density becomes even difficult. In this paper, an Effective Planning of CSs Network (CSN) is proposed. Comprehensive environmental elements (e.g. cities' and CSs' information, EV charging status, etc.) are considered in CSN. The CSN deals with complicated city planning in giant cities (i.e. large population, high EV density, etc.). Hong Kong is selected as the case study because it can be regarded as a typical giant city. Results show that the proposed CSN can ensure the EVs can find a CS before it is out of power. Besides, the CSN saves ~18% financial cost for the charging infrastructure planning in giant cities.