SAI: Large-scale Planning for Electric Vehicle Public 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.

The United States is investing heavily in its electric vehicle infrastructure. Public charging stations represent an important part of that infrastructure. Achieving national goals will require the addition of 500,000 new public charging stations by 2030.

This expansion is expected to yield significant economic benefits and to promote the adoption of electric vehicles. It will also reshape the way Americans travel and access opportunities. To fully leverage this investment requires attention to human and social considerations, and to anticipate unintended negative consequences.

This SAI project develops a human-centered planning framework for public charging stations. It integrates human cognitive processes and social impacts into engineering models, with the goal of ensuring long-term community benefits. The research contributes to sustainable and fair nationwide public charging networks by gaining a better understanding of how people make choices about public charging station use and by considering the equitable distribution of those stations across the country.

Bringing a convergence of expertise from psychology, sociology, and engineering, this project creates an integrated public charging station framework. Using survey data and laboratory experiments, a cognitive framework is developed to account for choices in the use of public charging stations. Equity and community impacts are investigated for both electric vehicle and non-electric vehicle users.

Public charging station deployment decisions are modeled, and the outcomes are validated using an agent-based simulator with realistic social cognition dynamics and real-world data. By using an integrative and interdisciplinary research approach, this project establishes new theories and models of social decision-making for public charging station choices.

It promotes new human-centered thinking of deploying public charging infrastructure, supporting the achievement of national electric vehicle goals.

This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences, the Directorate for Engineering, and the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

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.