  This work focuses on finding optimal locations for charging stations for
one-way electric car sharing programs. The relocation of vehicles by a service
staff is generally required in vehicle sharing programs in order to correct
imbalances in the network. We seek to limit the need for vehicle relocation by
strategically locating charging stations given estimates of traffic flow. A
mixed-integer linear programming formulation is presented with a large number
of potential charging station locations. A column generation approach is used
which finds an optimal set of locations for the continuous relaxation of our
problem. Results of a numerical experiment using real traffic and geographic
information system location data show that our formulation significantly
increases the balanced flow across the network, while our column generation
technique was found to produce a superior solution in much shorter computation
time compared to solving the original formulation with all possible station
locations.
