Optimal Public Parking Lot Allocation and Management for Efficient PEV Accommodation in Distribution Systems

Progressive popularization of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) calls for synergistic deployment of public charging infrastructures to serve the recharging needs in future urban systems. For this end, a new planning framework to facilitate efficient accommodation of PEVs via gridable parking lots (PLs) is proposed in this study. Different from most previous works, the presented method explicitly considers the potential uncertainties in the users’ behaviors in the PL planning, which will allow decision-makers to better assess the effect of human factors on the efficiency of their investment. Moreover, the concerned PL allocation problem has been investigated in conjunction with the optimal contract offer for PEV users to obtain the final planning scheme. The overall problem is formulated as a two-stage stochastic programming model, where the first-stage mainly deals with the planning decisions associated with PLs, including siting and sizing of PLs and contractual arrangements; while the second stage evaluates the operational performance of the suggested PL system under different scenario realizations of PEV behaviors. A combinatorial optimization algorithm is used to solve the problem. The proposed framework is demonstrated on an illustrative testing system and numerical results verify the effectiveness of our method.