1
Optimal placement of EV fast charging stations
considering the impact on electrical distribution
and traffic condition
P. Phonrattanasak and N. Leeprechanon, Senior Member, IEEE
 directly into a low voltage receptacle. The recharge rate is
Abstract-- The battery of an electric vehicle (EV) needs to be
recharged when it is exhausted. So charging stations must be
extensively installed to sufficiently serve a number of electric
vehicles, especially in residential areas. Since electric charging
stations will be used simultaneously by many EVs, they should be
optimally installed in areas of dense traffic for minimum total
cost of the fast charging station. Another impact of fast charging
station on the electric distribution system is transmission line loss
which should be minimized. In this paper, the calculation for
number of fast charging stations in a residential area and an
optimization model of fast charging station planning is proposed.
Ant colony optimization (ACO) is implemented to minimize total
cost of fast charging station or transmission line loss in the
optimization model subject to traffic and power system security
constraints. An IEEE 69-bus system in a residential area is used
to verify the proposed technique. The results show that ACO
method found the best location of fast charging station on
residential power distribution with minimum total cost or loss
while satisfying many technical and geographical constraints.
Index Terms-- Distribution system, Electric vehicle, Ant
colony optimization and Fast charging station
I. INTRODUCTION
E lectric vehicle (EV) is expected to be the most popular
moving machine in the world replacing internal
combustion engines in the near future [1]. The biggest
advantage of EVs is that they do not emit the pollution
associated with internal combustion engines. Another
important advantage of EV over internal combustion engines
is the lower cost of the fuel, electricity for EVs and gasoline
for the internal combustion engines. The United States
Department of Energy has calculated that a typical EV can run
for 43 miles on a dollar's worth of electricity, a distance which
cannot be achieved for a dollar by internal combustion engines
[2].However EV needs to recharge its battery from a charging
station which supplies sufficient electricity for battery
charging [3-4].
There are three primary types of charging station [5]. The
first type is termed a “Level I” and the charging process is
often referred to as “low power charging.” The EV is plugged
N. Leeprechanon is assistant professor with the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, Thammasat University, Phatumthani, Thailand
(Corresponding Author. e-mail: DR.N.L@ieee.org).
P. Phonrattanasak is PhD. candidate with the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, Thammasat University, Phatumthani, Thailand (e-
mail: tumneu@live.com).
very slow taking up to 15 hours or more to charge the average
EV battery. The second type of charging station is called a
“Level II” device and is faster than a Level 1 unit. This type
uses a low voltage circuit to fully charge an EV in as little as 5
hours. The third type of charging station, a “Level III”
charging station or fast charging station, is not currently
available to residential customers. Fast charging equipment
enables rapid charging along heavy traffic corridors and at
public stations. One fast charge can add 60 to 80 miles of
range to a light-duty plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) or
EV.
Therefore a fast charging station would be very convenient
for recharging an EV because it can recharge the battery of EV
fully within 10 minutes as in Fig.1. So fast charging stations
could be placed along the street like petrol stations in
residential areas and connected to the electric power
distribution grid. However loss in transmission grid should be
considered because it would certainly have a large impact on
the distribution grid from high power consumption for fast
charging. It is envisaged that an EV charging station planner
must determine the suitable location of a fast charging station
in order to reduce its impact on the distribution grid. Another
important factor that needs to be considered by the planner is
the distance between the house of an EV customer and
charging station to be capable of recharging the battery in a
day. Hence a charging station should be placed in the location
where a high density of EVs are owned or used. This will
reduce the cost of travelling for the EV customer each day.
The impact of fast charging station on distribution has been
studied and it is concluded that charging stations affect
transformer loading and system bus voltage profiles [6].
Running cost including power supply losses and traffic flow as
constraint conditions was studied in [7, 8]. However, the
optimization for finding minimum line loss of the distribution
grid or total cost of installation has still to be developed under
constraint of the power distribution network, especially
planning for fast charging stations in residential areas with
traffic constraints.
 2

NB
PLoss   I Ri
2
(2)
i 1

where I is current and Ri is the line resistance in line i

respectively. N B is the number of branches in the electrical
distribution system.
3. Constraints
3.1 Constraints of the installed position of a fast charging
station or traffic constraints in a residential area.
Fig. 1. Fast charging station or quick charging station [9] n

This paper focuses on two objectives for optimal placement g

h 1
hp 1 (3)
of fast charging stations on electric power distribution systems
in residential areas: total cost of installation for fast charging Dph  Rh (4)
station and transmission line loss of the distribution grid. The Caph  lf  cos h  o
ant colony system is employed to find optimal location of a Ph  , h  1, 2,...., n (5)
chg _ time
fast charging station on the power distribution system in a
residential area with traffic and power system security where lf is the load factor of charging station h ; Caph is the
constraints. The algorithm is applied to an IEEE 69 bus power capacity of charging station h ; cos  h is the power factor of
system to illustrate the performance. charging station h ; Ph is the total load of all vehicles going
to station h for a daily charge; Rh is the charging radius of
II. PROPOSED OPTIMIZATION MODEL FOR FAST CHARGING
charging station h and is the traffic constraint of the fast
STATION PLANNING
n
A. Objective functions and constraints of proposed model charging station for EVs; g
h 1
hp  1 means that each vehicle
Two objectives for the proposed optimization model are:
1. Total cost of installation for fast charging station is goes to only one station for charging.
formulated as follows: 3.2 Security constraints of power distribution system
 k (1  k ) 
n m n These
n incorporate the constraints of voltage magnitudes of all
C  C1  C2  C3   F     F  t cz   g hp LDbuses as well as distributed line loadings as follows:
 (1  k )  1 h 1
m hp
h 1 h 1 pJ h
Vi min  Vi  Vi max , i  N B (6)
(1)
Initial investment cost or uniform capital recovery  C1  is Si  Si , i  N S
max
(7)

used to find the annual value of the present value; where n is
the number of fast charging stations; F is the investment cost
of a fast charging station h ; k is investment rate of return
namely the discount rate; m is the investment return period.
Annual variable cost of operation of charging station  C2 
includes maintenance costs, material costs, staff salaries and
electricity cost. It can be converted into the initial investment
cost, of which α is a conversion coefficient. Travelling cost or
cost of wear and tear of EV  C3  considers total annual
travelling of all EVs to the fast charging station in order to
recharge the battery; t is road twist coefficient;  is smooth
traffic coefficient of the road; L is loss coefficient; n is the
number of charging stations; c is annual charging times per
vehicle; z is turnaround coefficient; J h stands for the queue
of vehicles at load point p moving to charging station h for
charging; g hp signifies parameters whether a vehicle at point
p goes to charging station h for charging; Dhp is distance
between charging station h and vehicle at load point p .
2. Real power loss in transmission line of the distribution
system
Real power loss is an important factor in the electric power
distribution system. Minimizing real power loss is considered
in this paper as follows.
Ssub  S sub
max
(8)
where Si is the line loading of each line in the distribution
grid. N B is the number of buses in distribution system. N S is
the number of sections in the distribution system. S sub is
electric power supply from distribution substation.
B. Distribution feeder of IEEE 69 bus
The distribution networks used in this paper are the IEEE
69-bus test systems illustrated in Fig. 2. System data and
parameters can be found in [5]. The 69-bus system has 68
sections with the total customer load of 3.802 MW and 2.693
MVar. It has 12.8 kV base and the line loading of the
distribution is 10 MVA. This total customer load is set as peak
demand on a weekday. The location of each bus in Tianjin
Development Zone can be found in [5]. The numbers of total
real and reactive power losses of the system are 219.66 kW
and 104.44 kVar, respectively. The maximum and minimum
voltages are 1.0 p.u. and 0.9 p.u. respectively. The maximum
power supply from the distribution substation is fixed at 8
MW.
 3

where ea is the total number of EVs to be charged per day ; o

4 7 11 15 19 23 27 32 36 40 45 is service hours of EV charging station in a day ; chg _ time is
charging period of each vehicle; q is the number of charging
8 12 16 20 heads in a charging station; the bracket [ ] gives the ceiling
number of n.
24 28 37 41
E. Proposed optimization model for optimal planning of fast
charging stations
1 2 3 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 38 42 46 49 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 65 66 67 68 69 Proposed optimization model for optimal planning of fast
charging stations can be determined as in Fig. 3.
43 47

30 34 39 44 48 50 52 54 56 58 60 62 64

6 10 14 18 22 26 31 35

Fig. 2. The IEEE 69-bus test system

TABLE I
PARAMETERS OF TRAFFIC FLOW AND FAST CHARGING STATION
Name Parameter Unit
Load factor of charging station( lf ) 0.9
Service time of EV charging station( o ) 24 Hour
charging time of each vehicle( chg _ time ) 0.1667 Hour
Charging station capacity( Cap ) 500 kVA
Power factor( cos ) 0.98
Capital recovery period( m ) 20 Year
Discount rate( k ) 0.1
Conversion coefficient(  ) 1.2
Road twist coefficient( t ) 1.1
Turnaround coefficient( z ) 1.5 Fig. 3. The IEEE 69-bus system of fast charging station in a residential area.
Smooth traffic coefficient (  ) 1.1
Loss coefficient( L ) 1.3 Yuan/km The residential area can be divided into many small areas
Annual charging times per vehicle( c ) 180 or defined areas where the number of electric vehicles is a
Number of charging heads per fast charging constant [10]. It can be viewed as a load point of the charging
station ( q ) 5 station and the EVs from the load point are always moving to
Selection set( J h ) [1,2,..,28] the nearest station for charging
In this model, one bus of IEEE 69 bus has to be chosen
Charging radius( R ) 1.2 km
from a set of bus numbers in order to install a fast charging
C. Residential area for testing the algorithm
station and it must serve the load point in the nearby area in
The power distribution system covering 10.5 square
which distance between the charging station and the load point
kilometers in a Tianjin Development Zone is used to test the
is not over the limit. Thus all fast charging stations must serve
proposed method. The system data and parameters include the
all load points but a load point can choose only one fast
population density of thirty thousand/km2. The location of
charging station.
center of gravity of EVs or load point in Fig.2 can be found in
Transmission line loss of the distribution system can be
[5, 9]. There are 3,140 electric vehicles in the Development
calculated with installation of the fast charging station as an
Zone. Parameters of traffic flow and fast charging station are
objective and total cost is the other objective which is used to
summarized in Table I.
find the optimal location of fast charging station with traffic
D. The calculation to find the number of fast charging stations
and power system security constraint. The main goal of
The number of fast charging stations in a residential area is
optimal planning of a fast charging is to minimize objective
proposed in this paper and calculated from the total number of
function in the optimization model while satisfying equality
EVs to be charged per day and other associated factors
and inequality constraints.
expressed as follows:
 e  chg _ time 
n a  1 (9)
 oq 
 4

III. THE ACO FOR SOLVING THE PROBLEM Step 1: Starting

A. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) Iteration (t ) = 0, Set  ij (0)   0 ,  ij  0, pij (0)  p0
Ant systems are inspired by the collective behavior of a real Step 2: Construct m ant solutions
ant colony. Marco Dorigo first introduced the Ant system and Construct m ant solutions with the state transition rule
developed it continually [11] until it was known as ACO. In
given in Eq. 10.The selection process of an ant k on bus j at
the past, ethnologists have studied how blind creatures such as
ants are capable of finding the shortest path to acquire food station i is based on spinning the roulette wheel on the
sources without using visual cues. They can adapt to changes probability calculated from the following equation:
 
in the environment such as an obstacle for finding food. The  ij (t )  ij (t ) 
studies of ethnologists reveal that such capabilities are p (t ) 
k
ij Ai
  (10)
  if (t ) if (t )
essentially due to communicating information between
individuals regarding the path to decide the direction. Ants
f 1
deposit a certain amount of pheromone while walking and
each ant probabilistically prefers to follow a direction of many 1
pheromones. This characteristic is used to develop an where ij  al
is a heuristic function which is defined as
algorithm which mimics the ant system in order to find the
shortest path in a studied problem.
d
l 1
il

The characteristics of an ACO comprise positive feedback,
distributed computation and the use of a constructive greedy
heuristic. Positive feedback accounts for rapid discovery of
good solutions, distributed computation avoids premature
convergence and the greedy heuristic helps to find possible
solutions in the early stages of the search process. The ACO
shows very good results in many areas of engineering. It has
also been applied with success to other combinatorial
optimization problems such as the vehicle routing problem
[12].
B. Apply ant colony optimization to the problem
The procedure of an ACO algorithm can be described as
follows: ants start at the nest and select a feasible route as a
solution. Each ant selects a route to walk following a
stochastic greedy search called the state transition rule. When
all ants have terminated their tours, the following steps are
performed. The amount of pheromone is modified by applying
the global updating rule. Ants are guided by both heuristic
information and pheromone information. Naturally, a path
with a high amount of pheromone is a desirable choice. The
pheromone updating rules are designed so that they will select
the highest amount of pheromone route which is visited by
ants. Fig. 4 shows routes of ants between the nest and a food
source in a test system.
Bus Bus Bus Bus Bus
1 1 1 1
visibilities of summation of distance between station i and
load point; parameters  and  determine the relative
influence of the trail information and heuristic function. An
at station i chooses a bus with a probability  ij , which
k
ant k
is a function of the heuristic information and the amount of
pheromone present on the path. The solutions which are
feasible solutions must satisfy all constraints.
Step 3: Evaluation of objective function
Evaluate objective function of feasible solutions
and find the best solution from all the ant solutions. The best
solution will be the optimal solution at this iteration.
Step 4: Global updating rule
The ant selects a route following the pheromone trails on
the bus. Let  ij (t ) be the trail intensity of station
i (i  1,.., n) on bus j ( j  1,.., A) . Then, each ant
k (k  1,.., m) selects bus j at station i to install the fast
charging station depending on the intensity of the associated
trail. The trail intensity is updated according to:
 ij (t  1)  (1   ) ij (t )   ij (11)
where  is a coefficient such that (1   ) represents the
evaporation of trail between iteration t and t  1 ; T is the
total number of iterations and  ij is given by:
m
 ij    ijk (12)
1 k 1

2 2 2 2 2 where  ijk is the quantity of trail substance by k th ant

     between iteration t and t  1 ;
Nest A 1 A2 1 An2 1 An1 1 Food
1 An 1 1 if k th ant at station i chooses bus j
A1 A2 An2 An1 An   
k
ij
0 otherwise
(13)
1 2 n2 n 1 n Step 5: Stopping
Station Set t  t  1 . If t  tmax then end; else go to Step 2.

Fig. 4. Routes of ants between nest and food source

 5

IV. NUMERICAL RESULTS

4500
A. Parameter setting
Numerical examples of 60 kW size of EV battery or
4000 |69
charging heads were performed on the proposed algorithm |68 o
described in the previous section. In order to validate the |67
3500 o
performance of the ACO method, it was used to find the |66 o
|65
minimum value of each objective function. All programs were o
|63
3000 | o o
computed by Pentium core2duo 2.2 GHz processor 2GB ram o | 45 |61
|36 40 o
|32 |
under Matlab® program. In each case study, 30 trial runs were o |
o 59
2500 | 27 o |
|55 57 | 64
|
carried out. |19 23 o o

metre
|15 o |41 |53 |60 62
| |
The parameters of ACO were set as number of ants = 200, |
| 11 |20 o |37 | 51
o 49
o | 58
2000 |54 56
maximum iterations = 200,   1 ,   0.8 ,and   0.05 ..
|46
|4 7 o |16 |28 | | o
| |24 | 42 | 52
o |8 12 | 38 |o
|29o 33 |43 47 |48 50 o
The number of fast charging stations can be calculated from 1500 | | 44
|
|21 25 |34 o39
|
Eq. 2 for ea = 3,140, o= 24, chg _ time 10 minute (1/6 o | |9
|13o 17 |30
1000 o| |35
5
hour), and q = 5 equal to 6 fast charging stations. This value
| | 31
| 3 | 26
| 22
|1 2 | 18
500 o |10 14
was used in all cases. |6

0
B. Numerical result -1000 -500 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
Size of charging head is set at 60 kW. Then the power metre

output from the fast charging station is 300 kW. Initial

Fig. 5. Optimal location of fast charging stations for minimum total cost
investment cost of a fast charging station is 6,000,000 Yuan.
Six fast charging stations are constructed to service all EVs.
4500
Power consumption for this case is the lowest and hence line
loss on residential power distribution should be also the 4000 |69
lowest. The minimum of total cost, loss and solution quality |68 o
obtained by ACO is shown in Table 2. From the Table, the |67
3500 o |66 o
standard deviation in this case is low. The optimal locations of |65
o
fast charging stations in the residential area are shown in Fig. 3000 | o
|63
o
o | 45 |61
5 and Fig.6. |36 40 o
| o |59
TABLE II. BEST SOLUTION o | 32
2500 |23 27 o |
|57
o | 64
|
o
metre

| 55
ACO |1519 o |41 |53 |60 62
| |
Charging station | |37 | 51 o | 58
Minimum Minimum 2000 | 11 |20 o
| o 49 |54 56
|4 7 o |16 |28 |42 46 | o
total cost loss |12 |24
o |8
|
|33 38 |47
o |50 52
| |43 |
Charging station 1 (Bus) 7 3 1500 | 29o | 48 o
|21 25 | 44
|34 o39
Charging station 2 (Bus) 13 4 |
|13o 17 |30
Charging station 3 (Bus) 32 25 1000 o | |9 o| |35
| 5 | 31
Charging station 4 (Bus) 47 49 | 3 | 26
| 22
|1 2 |1418
|
Charging station 5 (Bus) 56 55 500 |6o 10

Charging station 6 (Bus) 65 66

0
Total cost (Yuan) 53,212,445 54,549,318 -1000 -500 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
metre
Power Loss(kW) 371.42 246.41
Solution Quality Fig. 6. Optimal location of fast charging stations for minimum loss
Minimum Value 53,212,445 246.41
Average Value 53,398,592 263.79 C. Discussions of results
Maximum Value 53,701,446 282.67 The results suggest that the planner should locate fast
Standard deviation 101,572 12.61 charging stations distributed over the power distribution
Average CPU time(sec) 248.46 245.23 system even though the last charging station will be far away
from the first bus. The first fast charging station should be
located nearest the first bus or substation. In all cases, all fast
charging stations can serve all EVs to recharge their batteries.
All positions of the fast charging station are located in high
density areas of residential housing. The power consumption
of fast charging stations has considerable impact on the
transmission line loss of the power distribution grid.
 6

V. CONCLUSION VII. BIOGRAPHIES

This paper proposes an optimization model for fast charging
Prakornchai Phonrattanasak was born in 1974
station planning on a residential power distribution system.
and received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. both in
The total cost of installation of fast charging station and loss Engineering from Khonkaen university, Thailand in
on distribution are proposed as objective functions of the 1996 and 2002 respectively. He is a lecturer at
optimization model subject to traffic constraint in a residential North Eastern University, Khonkaen, Thailand
while pursuing his PhD in Engineering at the
area and system security on the power distribution system.
Department of Electrical and Computer
The battery sizes of EV for fast charging station i.e. 60 kW are Engineering, Thammasat university. His research
used as case study in the residential area of Tianjin interests are in the area of power system economics,
Development Zone. The ACO is employed to find the optimal optimization modeling, renewable energy and smart
grid development issues.
locations of the fast charging stations in the power distribution
system. The numerical result demonstrates that a fast charging
station in the optimal location has minimum total cost of Nopbhorn Leeprechanon was born in 1969 and
installation and real power loss on the power system. In obtained his B.Eng.(Hons) and M.Eng., both in
addition, the results indicate that ACO algorithm has Electrical Power Engineering from the King
Mongkut Institute of Technology Ladkrabang,
robustness and effectiveness to determine optimal location of
Thailand in 1991 and 1996 respectively, and
a fast charging station. received his PhD from Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology (RMIT University), Australia in 2003.
VI. REFERENCES He is currently an Assistant Professor within the
Department of Electrical and Computer
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