Niloofar Aminikalibar

Niloofar Aminikalibar, Farzaneh Farhadi, Maria Chli

The transition to Electric Vehicles (EVs) demands intelligent, congestion-aware infrastructure planning to balance user convenience, economic viability, and traffic efficiency. We present a joint optimisation framework for EV Charging Station (CS) placement and pricing, explicitly capturing strategic driver behaviour through coupled non-atomic congestion games over road networks and charging facilities. From a Public Authority (PA) perspective, the model minimises social cost, travel times, queuing delays and charging expenses, while ensuring infrastructure profitability. To solve the resulting Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programme, we propose a scalable two-level approximation method, Joint Placement and Pricing Optimisation under Driver Equilibrium (JPPO-DE), combining driver behaviour decomposition with integer relaxation. Experiments on the benchmark Sioux Falls Transportation Network (TN) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms single-parameter baselines, effectively adapting to varying budgets, EV penetration levels, and station capacities. It achieves performance improvements of at least 16% over state-of-the-art approaches. A generalisation procedure further extends scalability to larger networks. By accurately modelling traffic equilibria and enabling adaptive, efficient infrastructure design, our framework advances key intelligent transportation system goals for sustainable urban mobility.

Niloofar Aminikalibar, Farzaneh Farhadi, Maria Chli

Real-world infrastructure planning increasingly involves strategic interactions among autonomous agents competing over congestible, limited resources. Applications such as Electric Vehicle (EV) charging, emergency response, and intelligent transportation require coordinated resource placement and pricing decisions, while anticipating the adaptive behaviour of decentralised, self-interested agents. We propose a novel multi-agent framework for joint placement and pricing under such interactions, formalised as a bi-level optimisation model. The upper level represents a central planner, while the lower level captures agent responses via coupled non-atomic congestion games. Motivated by the EV charging domain, we study a setting where a central planner provisions chargers and road capacity under budget and profitability constraints. The agent population includes both EV drivers and non-charging drivers (NCDs), who respond to congestion, delays, and costs. To solve the resulting NP-hard problem, we introduce ABO-MPN, a double-layer approximation framework that decouples agent types, applies integer adjustment and rounding, and targets high-impact placement and pricing decisions. Experiments on benchmark networks show that our model reduces social cost by up to 40% compared to placement- or pricing-only baselines, and generalises to other MAS-relevant domains.