Research On The Market Cultivation Effect Of Charging Facility Construction For Electric Vehicles

As one of the important strategic emerging industries,electric vehicle industry is a keyarea in cultivating growth momentum and accumulating competitive advantages.However,due to the lagging charging facilities construction,its development has been seriously restricted in China.Thus Chinese central government has successively introduced kinds of policy support to encourage local facility construction work.It is worth noting that,despite the fact that increasing facilities would be helpful to promote consumers adoption,it only functions when the number of charging facilities reaches certain scale because of the consumers' wait-and-see psychology.Since the heterogeneity exists in vehicles demand and consumption ability among different sized cities,consumers' expected number of charging facility tends to be diversified,so as the effect of charging facility construction.For consideration of both costs and benefits,how to choose major supported cities in the promotion process of charging facility construction becomes an issue for related government departments to consider,which is also our main research content.To compare the market cultivation effect of charging facility construction in different sized cities,this paper established an agent-based industry evolution model depicting the decision-making mechanism of both enterprises and consumers,with the theoretical framework of history-friendly model as a reference.Combined with computer simulation method,the market diffusion process of electric vehicles in different sized cities before and after the charging infrastructure construction was simulated repeatedly using Matlab 7.0software.Initial parameters were set referring to the statistical data of Chinese first,second and third tier cities and "the number of increased electric vehicles sales brought by every new charging station" was the evaluation index for charging infrastructure market cultivation effect.Finally,a parameter sensitivity analysis was performed to validate simulation results robustness.Research results has shown that ceteris paribus,the purchase of electric vehicles would keep increasing year by year but hardly surpass 4% of market share after the evolution of 50periods;The number of electric vehicles per charging station serves in different sized cities distributes as gradient-type,which means a larger city owns a lower utilization rate of charging stations;Accelerating the construction of charging facilities would help stimulateconsumers purchase desire by reducing charging time cost.Through the comparison of simulation results among three kinds of cities,it is found that the promotion effect of every newly increased charging station is the most significant in third-tier cities.Therefore,the central government could provide more financial support for small sized cities to stimulate their market potential in the future.