Planning highway charging networks for heavy-duty electric vehicles

Abstract

As freight electrification progresses, the planning of high-power charging infrastructure becomes a critical challenge due to the interaction between time-constrained operations, spatially uneven demand, and limited grid-connection capacity. Current European Union regulation specifies corridor coverage requirements, but does not explicitly account for local demand intensity, station sizing, or grid constraints. This article presents an integrated optimization framework for planning highway charging infrastructure for heavy-duty electric vehicles (HDEVs). The framework combines freight-tour simulation, route- and energy-aware charging event generation, candidate-site identification, and optimization-based station siting, sizing, and event-level scheduling. In addition, a constant-current/constant-voltage (CC–CV) post-processing step is used to obtain more realistic charging durations and aggregate charging profiles. The framework is applied to the Netherlands for 2025, 2030, and 2040 under both demand-driven and regulatory-driven planning paradigms, considering charger ratings of 350 kW and 1 MW. The results show that demand-driven planning achieves full event feasibility on the modelled corridor network, whereas the regulatory-driven planning exhibits a small but persistent feasibility gap due to its more geographically constrained candidate set. Across scenario years, infrastructure expansion follows a two stage pattern, shifting from initial spatial coverage to capacity densification at persistent freight corridors. Sensitivity analysis further shows that 1 MW networks are substantially more exposed than 350 kW networks to grid limits and vehicle-side charging assumptions. Overall, the proposed framework provides a practical decision support tool for designing scalable, cost-effective, and operationally realistic HDEVs charging networks.