IDENTIFICATION OF PUBLIC RECHARGING ZONES FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLES IN URBAN AREAS
In recent years, in developed and developing countries such as Brazil, an increase in the penetration of electric vehicles in urban areas has been noticed. Given this penetration in cities, finding areas for the installation of a charging infrastructure has become a necessity. Therefore, due to the recharging demands of electric vehicles, the agents involved in the diffusion of electric vehicles must build recharging stations, enabling each electric vehicle to find available recharging stations within its travels. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to identify public charging zones on the main avenues and streets of urban areas, considering the spatial dispersion of electric vehicle buyers and their urban travel patterns. The identification of the centroids of the charging zones is formulated as a p-means problem, being solved by the Teist-Bart algorithm to provide a greater coverage to the electric charging demands within extensive urban areas. The proposed methodology was applied in the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia to find the spatial distribution of public charging zones, considering 6 prospective scenarios of global electric vehicle penetration. The results of the allocation of the centroids of the charging zones for this city were confronted with the allocation performed by a commercial geoprocessing software. This confrontation shows that the proposal determines a spatial distribution of these zones with lower values of maximum coincident demand per station to serve the same amount of electric vehicles in each prospective scenario analyzed. Fewer values of this demand can allow fewer investments for the connection of future charging stations to the electric grid. The proposed methodology can assist the agents involved in the diffusion of electric mobility, finding public charging zones closer to the locations of higher charging demand by electric vehicle owners.