Searching for adoption of electric vehicles to our modern life: a discrete event simulation analysis

Considering a massive stride in improving decarbonization and eventually in reaching net zero emission goal, electrification has spread through all types of industries. Prominently, in the transportation sector, the shift from fossil fuel toward electric vehicles (EVs) has been intensely realized and the past several years have seen the proliferation of EVs on the roads. Although influx of EVs is a fact, the literature suffers to provide valuable insights related to full-scale adoption of EVs. This paper proposes a novel and comprehensive variant of charging infrastructure in which there are noncommercial, commercial, and contracted commercial EVs depending on the offered business model. EVs can request alternating current (AC) charging, direct current (DC) charging, and battery swapping, and these requests are fulfilled by fixed and mobile chargers. Having developed a discrete event simulation model of the problem at hand, we implement full factorial experimental design, through which impacts of several factors involving business model, service type, arrival rate of EVs, waiting threshold, and the number of mobile chargers are detected on critical measures ranging from queuing times to the rate and mean time of EVs exceeding waiting threshold and from total revenue to service rate and utilization rate of mobile chargers. Significant statistical findings along with possible explanations are discussed.