Electric vehicles: a review of network modelling and future research needs

Electric vehicles are believed to be an effective solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Despite extensive study on the attributes and characteristics of Electric vehicles and their charging infrastructure design, the development and network modelling of electric vehicles are still evolving and limited. This article provides a comprehensive review of electric vehicle studies and identifies existing research gaps in the aspects of theories, modelling approaches, solution algorithms and applications. This article first describes the electric vehicles' concepts, market share, characteristics and charging infrastructures. Then, the studies on traffic assignment problem with electric vehicles in the network and limited charging facilities are particularly discussed. We conclude that it is of great importance to take into account electric vehicles' special characteristics (e.g. range limit) in predicting their routing behaviour and charging infrastructure design networks.