Charge Point Search Policies for EVs - Minimizing The Cruise for Juice

The increased adoption rate of electric vehicles (EVs) into the market requires adequate charging infrastructure (CI). Many cities are still improving the CI to cope with the increased charging demands. Many studies in recent years have focused on how CI could be efficiently installed and used by EVs. However, with the availability of hundreds of charging points (CPs) in certain cities, like Munich, the research focus may shift towards the effectiveness of already installed CI for the end-user, for example, in terms of additional driven and walking distances. To this end, the study evaluates and quantifies the benefits of different strategies for locating available CPs. It examines three variants: the manual search method where the driver manually searches for free CPs, an informed search method where the driver uses an application to find free CPs, and a reservation system where the user can also reserve free CPs. This paper studies the benefits of each of these strategies in an agent-based simulation in the city of Munich using current CI. The results show that the informed charging and reservation-based strategies can significantly reduce the additional driving distance and increase the overall utilization of the CI.