Optimal Siting of Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles Based on Fuzzy Delphi and Hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approaches from an Extended Sustainability Perspective

Optimal siting of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) is crucial to the sustainable development of electric vehicle systems. Considering the defects of previous heuristic optimization models in tackling subjective factors, this paper employs a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework to address the issue of EVCS siting. The initial criteria for optimal EVCS siting are selected from extended sustainability theory, and the vital sub-criteria are further determined by using a fuzzy Delphi method (FDM), which consists of four pillars: economy, society, environment and technology perspectives. To tolerate vagueness and ambiguity of subjective factors and human judgment, a fuzzy Grey relation analysis (GRA)-VIKOR method is employed to determine the optimal EVCS site, which also improves the conventional aggregating function of fuzzy Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacijia I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). Moreover, to integrate the subjective opinions as well as objective information, experts’ ratings and Shannon entropy method are employed to determine combination weights. Then, the applicability of proposed framework is demonstrated by an empirical study of five EVCS site alternatives in Tianjin. The results show that A3 is selected as the optimal site for EVCS, and sub-criteria affiliated with environment obtain much more attentions than that of other sub-criteria. Moreover, sensitivity analysis indicates the selection results remains stable no matter how sub-criteria weights are changed, which verifies the robustness and effectiveness of proposed model and evaluation results. This study provides a comprehensive and effective method for optimal siting of EVCS and also innovates the weights determination and distance calculation for conventional fuzzy VIKOR.