It is highly challenging to measure the efficiency of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) because factors affecting operational characteristics of EVCSs are time-varying in practice. For the efficiency measurement, environmental factors around the EVCSs can be considered because such factors affect charging behaviors of electric vehicle drivers, resulting in variations of accessibility and attractiveness for the EVCSs. Considering dynamics of the factors, this paper examines the technical efficiency of 622 electric vehicle charging stations in Seoul using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The DEA is formulated as a multi-period output-oriented constant return to scale model. Five inputs including floating population, number of nearby EVCSs, average distance of nearby EVCSs, traffic volume and traffic congestion are considered and the charging frequency of EVCSs is used as the output. The result of efficiency measurement shows that not many EVCSs has most of charging demand at certain periods of time, while the others are facing with anemic charging demand. Tobit regression analyses show that the traffic congestion negatively affects the efficiency of EVCSs, while the traffic volume and the number of nearby EVCSs are positive factors improving the efficiency around EVCSs. We draw some notable characteristics of efficient EVCSs by comparing means of the inputs related to the groups classified by K-means clustering algorithm. This analysis presents that efficient EVCSs can be generally characterized with the high number of nearby EVCSs and low level of the traffic congestion.

Evaluating the operational efficiency of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) is important to understand charging network evolution and the charging behavior of electric vehicle users. However, aggregation of efficiency performance metrics poses a significant challenge to practitioners and researchers. In general, the operational efficiency of EVCSs can be measured as a complicated function of various factors with multiple criteria. Such a complex aspect of managing EVCSs becomes one of the challenging issues to measure their operational efficiency. Considering the difficulty in the efficiency measurement, this paper suggests a way to measure the operational efficiency of EVCSs based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). The DEA model is formulated as constant returns of output-oriented model with five types of inputs, four of them are the numbers of floating population and nearby charging stations, distance of nearby charging stations and traffic volume as desirable inputs and the other is the traffic speed in congestion as undesirable one. Meanwhile, the output is given by the charging frequency of EVCSs in a day. Using real-world data obtained from reliable sources, we suggest operational efficiencies of EVCSs in Seoul and discuss implications on the development of electric vehicle charging network. The result of efficiency measurement shows that most of EVCSs in Seoul are inefficient, while some districts (Nowon-gu, Dongdaemun-gu, Dongjak-gu, Songpa-gu, Guro-gu) have relatively more efficient EVCSs than the others.