Seminar: ILP formulations for finding optimal locations for charging stations in an electric car sharing network

The seminar will be given by Dr. Georg Brandstätter, University of Vienna.

  • Date: 21 January 2016 from 15:30 to 17:00

  • Event location: Room 5.1, School of Engineering and Architecture, viale Risorgimento 2, Bologna

Contact Name:

Live-streaming of the seminar will be available at the following URL:

https://webconference.unibo.it/or-seminar

 

About the speaker

Dr. Georg Brandstätter, University of Vienna

2008 - 2011: Bachelor's program "Software & Information Engineering" at the Vienna University of Technology

2010 - 2014: Undergraduate teaching assistant at the Vienna University of Technology

2011 - 2015: Master's program "Software Engineering & Internet Computing" at the Vienna University of Technology

since 2014: Predoc at the University of Vienna, Department of Statistics and Operations Research

since 2015: PhD program "Abraham Wald PhD program in Statistics and Operations Research" at the University of Vienna

Abstract

Recent technological advancements have made electric vehicles a more reasonable choice in many applications where conventionally powered vehicles have been used previously. One such application is urban car sharing, where customers rent cars for short periods of time to move around within a city.

However, the range of most electric cars is still fairly limited, and recharging them takes longer than refueling cars with an internal combustion engine. Therefore, a network of charging stations must be built within system's operational area, where the cars can be recharged between trips. Since building these stations is very costly, their locations must be chosen carefully to optimize the system's operational efficiency.

We present several integer linear programming formulations for solving the problem of optimally placing charging stations within the network's operational area, as well as finding their optimal size. Given a limited budget, our objective is to maximize the profit gained from the estimated customer demand that can be satisfied by the constructed stations. To improve flexibility, customers can pick up a car at any sufficiently close station, as well as return it to any station near their destination (subject to the availability of a car and free charging slot, respectively).