Optimizing the Configuration of Electric Vehicle Charging Piles in Public Parking Lots Based on a Multi-Agent Model

With the rapid development of electric vehicles, how to improve the charging efficiency of electric vehicles has become a challenge. The Chinese government has made great efforts to build charging piles. At present, the most popular construction mode is to build charging piles on a fixed proportion of spaces in existing parking lots. The proportions of charging piles recommended by the government, which is known as a one-size-fits-all strategy. Challenges have arisen with the growth of electric vehicles, such as how to keep hot charging piles from overheating. This paper mainly simulates the actual demand and optimizes the configuration of charging piles to reduce the uneven spatial distribution of charging demand, to improve the overall utilization efficiency of regional charging stations. In particular, based on agent-based simulation technology, a multi-agent system of the road network, vehicles, and charging stations is constructed to simulate the charging behavior in the mixed scenario of electric vehicles and traditional fuel vehicles. The optimization model aims to design the configuration of charging piles to minimize the sum of electric vehicle queueing time, gasoline vehicle queueing time, and vehicle transfer time to idle parking lots. The model is solved by the genetic algorithm. This paper takes the Wulin Square business district in Hangzhou as a real-world example. The simulation results show that by optimizing the number of charging piles, the objective function is reduced by 17.1% compared with the initial number of charging piles, which effectively improves the operation efficiency of the parking system. To this end, this paper predicts the electric vehicle charging demand in the city and optimizes the configuration of charging facilities, which is conducive to maximizing social benefits in the transportation system and has good practical engineering application value.