Collaborative Research: SAI: Planning for Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Amidst the global shift toward green and sustainable urban transportation systems, substantial investments have been made in infrastructure to facilitate the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in the United States. The placement of an EV charging station (EVCS) potentially has significant broader impacts on peoples' mobility, activity patterns, and visitation to nearby businesses during charging sessions.

This provides an opportunity for policy makers to support local businesses (e.g., cafes, restaurants, grocery stores), particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, which play a pivotal role in maintaining community health, especially in vulnerable communities. This SAI project tackles the question of how and where to best place EV charging stations to ensure they not only meet the needs of drivers but also boost the economic resilience of small businesses and promote social equity.

The project integrates theory and methods from computational social science, urban resilience, behavioral science, and complex systems to address a pressing societal need -- the equitable, resilient, and sustainable deployment of EVCSs. This project leverages large-scale datasets including mobile phone GPS, charging station usage data, and real-world intervention experiments to understand the broader social and economic impacts of EVCS placement on mobility, social dynamics, and the resilience of businesses.

This complex systems approach introduces a new paradigm of infrastructure development and management that significantly extends the scope from individual behavior to social and economic community-wide effects, offering a more comprehensive understanding of the EVCS ecosystem. The optimization and visualization platform will enable agencies and businesses to evaluate hypothetical deployment scenarios, promoting a multi-dimensional approach to infrastructure design.

The open-source and public-facing platform ensures that its benefits are not confined to the academic realm but are extended to diverse community stakeholders, reinforcing the project's commitment to inclusive and comprehensive urban development.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.