Executive Summary : | It has been estimated that by 2030, the number of passenger vehicles in the world will be more than 1.1 billion, compared to 750 million in 2010. And because the current transport system is heavily reliant on fossil fuels so there will be a corresponding greenhouse effect. This global concern of greenhouse gas emissions and the need to reduce fossil fuel consumption for current transportation systems have caused the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EV) during the last few years. As per the International Energy Outlook report 2017, the number of electric vehicles has crossed more than 2 million globally in 2016, with countries like Norway, Sweden, China and USA being at the top in market share. This number is expected to rise to 20 million by 2020 and 70 million by 2025. India, being one of the fastest-growing automobile industries in the World, however, lacks in EV adoption rate as per the global standards. Of the more than 3 million cars sold in India in 2017, only 0.1% is EV. Although, the Government of India has taken numerous initiatives and has set an ambitious target of achieving a 100% electric vehicle nation by 2030, one of the main concerns for the current passive demand for EVs is because of the lack of charging facilities. This is evident from the fact that out of the 20 electric cars deployed in the city of Nagpur by the online transportation company, Ola, more than 60% of the car drivers complained of long waiting hours at charging stations and high operating expenses. Apart from charging infrastructure, EVs also suffer from low engine capacity that makes the journey comparatively slower than the traditional vehicles and the batteries have limited charge storage capacities, which reduce the range of distance that can be covered in one charge. This requires us to come up with a solution to route these EVs on a path that takes the least amount of time and energy. A significant number of existing works in the literature report address various aspects of EV, especially on EV scheduling and eco-routing problem. However, most of the existing works do not consider all the aspects of EV together and thus do not provide realistic solutions. Moreover, optimizing the development of charging infrastructure, specifically the placement of charging stations for a country like India, is of critical importance and has not been studied thoroughly so far. Thus, in this project, it is proposed to build an automated framework to develop infrastructure to support the wider use of EVs that optimizes the number of charging stations and their locations that must be placed. The objective is to design and develop an automated tool that takes a city network (includes various information about traffic, vehicles, and available roads) and suggests the optimal locations for charge station placements and optimal routes for the EVs in terms of time and energy efficiency. |