Electric Vehicle Hosting Capacity in Distribution Systems: A Critical Review of Distributed Generation Foundations, Unified Assessment, and Emerging Research Directions

Electric vehicle hosting capacity (EV-HC) is increasingly important for distribution-system planning, yet existing reviews provide limited guidance on how mature distributed-generation hosting-capacity (DG-HC) concepts should be transferred to mobility-dependent and potentially bidirectional EV operation. This review uses a transfer–adaptation–reformulation taxonomy to examine how DG-HC foundations can be transferred to EV-HC. It distinguishes connected charger capacity from coincident charging demand, feasible from safe multi-resource regions, and firm from flexibility-dependent HC. Assessment approaches are compared across six non-exclusive dimensions: uncertainty treatment, temporal representation, solution mechanism, model fidelity, control treatment, and computational acceleration. The evidence shows that no single constraint universally governs EV-HC; voltage, thermal loading, unbalance, or power quality may become binding depending on feeder characteristics and charging conditions. Operational measures can release network headroom, but HC enhancement is established only after recalculating the feasible boundary under consistent assumptions. Direct evidence for risk-calibrated and AI-assisted EV-HC remains limited, motivating consequence-aware risk treatment, standardized reporting, and real-network validation.