Optimal siting of electric vehicle charging stations: A GIS-based fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Electric vehicles (EVs) are both economic and ecological vehicles which get their power from rechargeable batteries inside the car. Since they have a lot advantages as producing nearly no carbon emissions or pollution, being cost effective and less noisy; the main disadvantage of these vehicles are recharge related problems. One approach to deal with this problem is to construct electric vehicle charging stations (EVCS). A proper EVCS also should be located very carefully to maximize EV usage. Thus in this paper a geographic information system (GIS)-based MCDA approach is applied to address the EVCS site selection. Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods are applied to choose the optimal EVCS sites. A four-step solution approach is developed for the problem: (i) determination of 15 criteria from different perspectives, (ii) using GIS to assign EVCS site availability score, (iii) prioritizing the criteria using fuzzy AHP and finally (iv) ranking the potential sites by using TOPSIS. Proposed hybrid methodology is applied to Ankara (capital city of Turkey) as a case study. Results show that suggested alternative locations outperform the current locations of 12 EVCS in terms of considered criteria.