Congestion Reduction in EV Charger Placement Using Traffic Equilibrium Models

Semih Kara; Yasin Sonmez; Can Kizilkale; Alex Kurzhanskiy; Nuno C. Martins; Murat Arcak

Paper

Congestion Reduction in EV Charger Placement Using Traffic Equilibrium Models

Abstract

Growing EV adoption can worsen traffic conditions if chargers are sited without regard to their impact on congestion. We study how to strategically place EV chargers to reduce congestion using two equilibrium models: one based on congestion games and one based on an atomic queueing simulation. We apply both models within a scalable greedy station-placement algorithm. Experiments show that this greedy scheme yields optimal or near-optimal congestion outcomes in realistic networks, even though global optimality is not guaranteed as we show with a counterexample. We also show that the queueing-based approach yields more realistic results than the congestion-game model, and we present a unified methodology that calibrates congestion delays from queue simulation and solves equilibrium in link-space.