Electric aircraft charging network design for regional routes: A novel mathematical formulation and kernel search heuristic

The uptake of electric aircraft appears faster today than predicted. Given the prominent electric aircraft technologies, short- and medium-haul routes are the ones that will benefit first, with the promise to revolutionize regional aviation at short notice. This paper proposes an optimization model to support the strategic design of charging networks for electric aircraft as a key enabling factor to prepare for and take full advantage of aviation electrification. The model, named Electric Aircraft Charging Network for Regional Routes, defines a network of airports and flight paths to optimally trade-off the number of charging bases (and associated investment costs) with connectivity and population coverage targets typical of regional routes serving remote regions. Due to computational challenges in large problem instances, we propose a Kernel Search heuristic and illustrate how it can deliver high quality solutions for large cases in a shorter computational time than the branch-and-cut algorithms. A real-world application to Sweden then demonstrates the practical insights of the proposed approach. We find that leveraging the many currently under-utilized regional airports has connectivity and investment benefits (on average +12.1% in number of origins covered, +5.8% in population coverage, and −7.3% reduction of travel times). Furthermore, increasing the maximum aircraft range on a single charge implies significantly fewer charging bases and more feasible travel options, thus favoring network resilience and granting higher flexibility for later planning stages.