Enhancing Campus Mobility: A Set Covering Problem for Electric Scooter Charging Stations at Cal Poly Pomona

Situated on a 1,438-acre land, Cal Poly Pomona has about 24,000 students, 2,600 faculty and staff. The huge campus makes it difficult for students to be on time for their classes without feeling exhausted and sweaty because of brisk walking from one class to another. Although Cal Poly Pomona provides the Bronco Express Shuttle service to students, its designated routes are inefficient. To complement the Shuttle service and enhance student mobility on campus we propose to have electric scooters and an infrastructure to support the installation of electric scooter charging stations. Pertinent data such as the Cal Poly Pomona campus bike rack station map and the class schedules were critical in the formulation of our mathematical model. Our model is based on the Set Covering Location Model (SCLM), a class of Integer Programming. The project's objective function is to minimize the number of electric scooters charging stations. Implemented the model using the Excel Solver but since it could only process a maximum of 200 items, we divided the campus map into 4 quadrants and focused in on just one of the quadrants with the largest number of active buildings. Limiting the changing decision variable values to binary, assigning the value of 1 to the four cells surrounding or closest to the active buildings, and choosing evolutionary method for Excel Solver to process data resulted to an optimal solution with minimum number of electric scooter charging stations.