Towards an Optimal Hybrid Algorithm for EV Charging Stations Placement using Quantum Annealing and Genetic Algorithms

Quantum Annealing is a heuristic for solving optimization problems that have seen a recent surge in usage owing to the success of D-Wave Systems. This paper aims to find a good heuristic for solving the Electric Vehicle Charger Placement (EVCP) problem, a problem that stands to be very important given the costs of setting up an electric vehicle (EV) charger and the expected surge in electric vehicles across the world. The same problem statement can also be generalised to the optimal placement of any entity in a grid and can be explored for further uses. Finally, the authors introduce a novel heuristic combining Quantum Annealing and Genetic Algorithms to solve the problem. The proposed hybrid approach entails seeding the genetic algorithm with the results of a quantum annealer. Our experiments show this method decreases the minimum distance from POIs by 42.89% compared to vanilla quantum annealing over our sample EVCP datasets.