Multiple domination models for placement of electric vehicle charging stations in road networks

Electric and hybrid vehicles play an increasing role in the road transport networks. Despite their advantages, they have relatively limited cruising range in comparison to traditional diesel/petrol vehicles and require significant battery charging time. Given a particular road network layout, determining appropriate locations and capacities for charging stations is a chal- lenging multi-objective optimisation problem with many constraints. Some of the key objectives are to minimise the length of detours from a desired route necessary for recharging while assuming a reasonably small number of charging stations to serve the whole network (e.g., see [2]). We propose to model the facility location problem for the placement of charging stations as a k-domination problem on reachability graphs derived from the original road network. This model takes into consideration natural assumptions such as a threshold for the remaining battery charge, and provides some guaranteed minimal choice for travelling to recharge the battery. Experimental evaluation and simulations for the proposed model have been done in the case of real road networks corresponding to the cities of Boston (USA) and Dublin (Ireland).