Multi-period planning for electric car charging station locations: A case of Korean Expressways

•We propose three methods for multi-period planning to locate electric charging stations.•We compare the three methods with the Korean Expressway data.•Excluding short/low-demand paths make problems tractable without losing coverage.•Multi-period location decisions can be significantly different from single-period decisions.•We consider five types of demand profile for additional insights.

One of the most critical barriers to widespread adoption of electric cars is the lack of charging station infrastructure. Although it is expected that a sufficient number of charging stations will be constructed eventually, due to various practical reasons they may have to be introduced gradually over time. In this paper, we formulate a multi-period optimization model based on a flow-refueling location model for strategic charging station location planning. We also propose two myopic methods and develop a case study based on the real traffic flow data of the Korean Expressway network in 2011. We discuss the performance of the three proposed methods.