Abstract
Locating and planning charging stations for Low-Emission Vehicles (LEVs) such as Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV), Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicle (HFCV), and Natural Gas Vehicle (NGV) are becoming increasingly important for LEV users, government, and the automobile industry. Conventional planning approach of charging station usually plans single functional charging station that can only serve one kind of LEVs, and other factors such as fuel type, driving range, initial fuel tank level, and refueling time of the LEV are less considered in the planning stage. In this article, we propose a bi-level planning model to locate and size Multi-Functional Charging Station (MFCS) which can recharge BEV, HFCV, and NGV at the same time in a medium-sized city with different functional areas (e.g., residential area, industrial area, CBD area). We also established a method for generating a daily route considering vehicle attributes and user habits, and we loaded these traveling data into the upper model to select a set of optimal combinations of refueling station locations with a relatively high success ratio. In the lower model, we introduced the mathematical relationship between number of chargers and average user waiting time, and set the total social cost factor, including investment cost and waiting time cost, to evaluate each optimal combination, and then identified the optimum locational result and defined the size of each station. In the case study, we verify the proposed model in several scenarios and conclude that multifunctional refueling station performs better in terms of investment cost and users’ satisfaction level.