  Charging infrastructure is the coupling link between power and transportation
networks, thus determining charging station siting is necessary for planning of
power and transportation systems. While previous works have either optimized
for charging station siting given historic travel behavior, or optimized fleet
routing and charging given an assumed placement of the stations, this paper
introduces a linear program that optimizes for station siting and macroscopic
fleet operations in a joint fashion. Given an electricity retail rate and a set
of travel demand requests, the optimization minimizes total cost for an
autonomous EV fleet comprising of travel costs, station procurement costs,
fleet procurement costs, and electricity costs, including demand charges.
Specifically, the optimization returns the number of charging plugs for each
charging rate (e.g., Level 2, DC fast charging) at each candidate location, as
well as the optimal routing and charging of the fleet. From a case-study of an
electric vehicle fleet operating in San Francisco, our results show that,
albeit with range limitations, small EVs with low procurement costs and high
energy efficiencies are the most cost-effective in terms of total ownership
costs. Furthermore, the optimal siting of charging stations is more spatially
distributed than the current siting of stations, consisting mainly of
high-power Level 2 AC stations (16.8 kW) with a small share of DC fast charging
stations and no standard 7.7kW Level 2 stations. Optimal siting reduces the
total costs, empty vehicle travel, and peak charging load by up to 10%.
