  To enhance environmental sustainability, many countries will electrify their
transportation systems in their future smart city plans. So the number of
electric vehicles (EVs) running in a city will grow significantly. There are
many ways to re-charge EVs' batteries and charging stations will be considered
as the main source of energy. The locations of charging stations are critical;
they should not only be pervasive enough such that an EV anywhere can easily
access a charging station within its driving range, but also widely spread so
that EVs can cruise around the whole city upon being re-charged. Based on these
new perspectives, we formulate the Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placement
Problem (EVCSPP) in this paper. We prove that the problem is non-deterministic
polynomial-time hard. We also propose four solution methods to tackle EVCSPP
and evaluate their performance on various artificial and practical cases. As
verified by the simulation results, the methods have their own characteristics
and they are suitable for different situations depending on the requirements
for solution quality, algorithmic efficiency, problem size, nature of the
algorithm, and existence of system prerequisite.
