  Currently, the utilization rate of public plug-in electric vehicle (PEV)
charging stations is only 15%. During the other 85% of the time, the chargers
are either idle or occupied by a fully charged PEV. Strategically switching a
fully charged PEV to another one waiting to charge, which we refer to as
interchange, is an indispensable measure to enhancing charging station
utilization. This paper studies the PEV charging station planning problem
considering strategic interchange, which has not yet been well studied in the
literature. The objective is to enhance utilization rate while lowering capital
investment and operation cost. A new power/energy aggregation model is proposed
for interchange operation and a chance-constrained planning model with
interchange is developed for a public charging station with customer demand
uncertainties. Numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the
performance of the proposed method. Simulation results show that incorporating
strategic interchange operation, can significantly decrease the number of
chargers, enhance utilization and economic efficiency.
