The environmental crisis has prompted the development of electric vehicles as a green and environmentally friendly mode of travel. Since a reasonable layout of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations is the prerequisite for developing the EV industry, obtaining an optimal and efficient EV charging station planning scheme is a key issue. Although the Chinese government has carried out a plan to build EV charging piles in residential and working places, it cannot properly fulfill the task of matching the charging needs for public transportation vehicles such as electric taxis (ETs). How to evaluate the performance of fast charging stations (FCSs) and how to help find the optimal ET charging station planning scheme are new challenges. In this paper, an improved destination selection model is proposed to simulate the ET operation system and to help find the optimal ET charging station size with statistical analysis based on the charging need prediction. A numerical case study shows that the proposed method can address ET charging behavior well and can help to statistically determine the size of each ET charging station, which should satisfy the constraints on the preset proportion of the ET charging service requests.

Economic load dispatch (ELD) is one of most fundamental issue for energy generation and distribution in power systems. For this purpose, different optimization techniques are developed and applied to ELD problem. In this paper, vortex search algorithm (VSA) is proposed and used for solving ELD problem. VSA method was developed from nature by observing the state of stirring liquids. Transmission losses, valve point loading effect, ramp rate limits and prohibited operating zone constraints are considered to solve ELD problem with VSA method. The feasibility and effectivity of this method is demonstrated for different cases. Obtained results are compared with different developed algorithms and these results clearly point out that proposed VSA method gives successfully outputs.