Electric car sharing stations site selection from the perspective of sustainability: A GIS-based multi-criteria decision making approach

It is undoubtedly that the environmental and economic benefits will increase by integrating electric vehicles, which are the vehicles of the future, with the car-sharing system. The problem of determining the locations of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCS) and service areas of the car-sharing system appear with the integration. Environmental and energy concerns are the biggest driving factor behind electric car-sharing systems. In this study, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method is proposed for the solution of site selection problems of electric car-sharing stations (ECSS). To do so, a three-step solution methodology is developed: (i) determining 20 sub-criteria and weighting the criteria with fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (f-AHP), (ii) obtaining a suitability map for potential ECSS via GIS, (iii) sorting the performance levels of ECSSs assigned according to the suitability map by Elimination and Choice Translating Reality (ELECTRE). The proposed methodology is applied for Istanbul, a metropolitan city in Turkey as a case study. The results show that the most suitable areas for ECSSs in the European and Anatolian side, Istanbul is an intercontinental city, are the south-east part and south-western part, respectively.