  This study proposes a bi-level optimization program to represent the electric
vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure design and utilization management problem
with user-equilibrium (UE) decisions. The upper level aims to minimize total
facility deployment costs and maximize the revenue generated from EV charging
collections, while the lower level aims to minimize the EV users' travel times
and charging expenses. An iterative technique is implemented to solve the
bi-level mixed-integer non-linear program that generates theoretical lower and
upper bounds to the bi-level model and solves it to global optimality. A set of
conditions are evaluated to show the convergence of the algorithm in a finite
number of iterations. The numerical results, based on three demand levels,
indicate that the proposed bi-level model can effectively determine the optimal
charging facility location, physical capacity, and demand-responsive pricing
scheme. The average charging price in medium demand level is increased by
38.21% compared to the lower level demand due to the surge in charging needs
and highly utilized charging stations.
