Supporting Site Selection Decision-Making Process for Public Charging Station of Electric Vehicles using Semantic Web Technologies

Cities account for two-thirds of global energy use and generate 70% of carbon dioxide. Transport is one of the main sectors of urban energy consumption. Many countries plan to push forward electric vehicles (EVs) to gradually dominate the transport sector in order to reduce transport energy consumption. Therefore, integrating EVs into urban energy systems and solving issues that restrict the widespread use of EVs is an urgent need in sustainable urban development.
The shortage and difficulty of planning public charging stations (PCS) restrict EVs’ promotion. The reason is that the shortage causes people to hesitate to purchase EVs, and the insufficient EVs quantity leads to limited investment in PCS, thus resulting in powerless EVs promotion. Simultaneously, the site selection decision-making process exist issues. The difficulty of comprehensively considering the multi-source information such as user behaviour, EVs parameter, and geographic information leads to challenges in the decision-making process of PCS. Therefore, the study aims to develop an ontology to integrate different source data to facilitate the decision-making process on PCS location.
Semantic web technology has the advantage of integrating heterogeneous information. This study first identifies factors affecting PCS location and divides the factors into classes. Second, the study captures ontologies involving PCS location and identifies relevant concepts and relationships. Since previous ontologies cannot fully cover the research purpose, the study partially reuses ontologies and supplies them with concepts. Finally, the study develops an ontology based on the above taxonomy and verifies the ontology using Rotterdam as a case study.
The study found that the semantic web-based approach is an effective method to support the integration of heterogeneous data. In conclusion, this study provides a platform to integrate data from different sources, assisting the PCS planning decision-making process of governments, investors and technology sectors, thereby promoting the use of electric vehicles and sustainable urban development.