DOVA-PATBM: An Intelligent, Adaptive, and Scalable Framework for Optimizing Large-Scale EV Charging Infrastructure
This work addresses the challenge of planning scalable and equitable EV charging networks for policymakers and infrastructure developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing optimization methods with new data integration.
The paper tackled the problem of optimizing large-scale electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure to handle diverse geographic contexts, resulting in a 12 percentage point increase in 30 km tile coverage and halving the mean travel distance for low-income residents to the nearest charger in Georgia, USA.
The accelerating uptake of battery-electric vehicles demands infrastructure planning tools that are both data-rich and geographically scalable. Whereas most prior studies optimise charging locations for single cities, state-wide and national networks must reconcile the conflicting requirements of dense metropolitan cores, car-dependent exurbs, and power-constrained rural corridors. We present DOVA-PATBM (Deployment Optimisation with Voronoi-oriented, Adaptive, POI-Aware Temporal Behaviour Model), a geo-computational framework that unifies these contexts in a single pipeline. The method rasterises heterogeneous data (roads, population, night lights, POIs, and feeder lines) onto a hierarchical H3 grid, infers intersection importance with a zone-normalised graph neural network centrality model, and overlays a Voronoi tessellation that guarantees at least one five-port DC fast charger within every 30 km radius. Hourly arrival profiles, learned from loop-detector and floating-car traces, feed a finite M/M/c queue to size ports under feeder-capacity and outage-risk constraints. A greedy maximal-coverage heuristic with income-weighted penalties then selects the minimum number of sites that satisfy coverage and equity targets. Applied to the State of Georgia, USA, DOVA-PATBM (i) increases 30 km tile coverage by 12 percentage points, (ii) halves the mean distance that low-income residents travel to the nearest charger, and (iii) meets sub-transmission headroom everywhere -- all while remaining computationally tractable for national-scale roll-outs. These results demonstrate that a tightly integrated, GNN-driven, multi-resolution approach can bridge the gap between academic optimisation and deployable infrastructure policy.