Estimating the Needed Volume of Investment in Developing a Chain of Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles along a Highway

The problem of developing a chain of charging stations for electric vehicles along a highway crossing a geographic region is considered, and a tool for determining an optimal structure of such a chain is proposed. The tool allows, particularly, the regional administration and interested private investors to estimate the needed volume of investment in developing the chain under uncertainty in a) a demand for electricity in the chain, b) the market cost of the equipment to be acquired and installed in the chain, and c) the maintenance cost of all the equipment and the cost of operating the chain. The problem under consideration is formulated as that of finding the maximin of a sum of several linear and two bilinear functions of vector arguments some coordinates of which are integer. Finding this maximin is proven to be reducible to solving a mixed programming problem having a linear structure.