Designing and Evaluating Activity-Based Electric Vehicle Charging in Urban Areas

The design of an effective charging management system plays a key role in the widespread deployment of Electric Vehicles (EVs). However, such design must consider a number of issues, especially in case of public charging stations, such as the impact of the EV charging on the power grid, the predictability of user mobility, the charging station utilization level, and, last but not least, user satisfaction. In this work, we focus on activity-based drivers' behaviors and we derive charging needs the EV management system shall deal with and evaluate the impact on user satisfaction of some implemented EV charging strategies. To this end, we have extended SUMO, a popular open-source generator of vehicular mobility traces to support activity-based mobility modes, EV charging and discharging models and EV charging planning and control. To validate the functionalities of this simulation environment we have carried a simulation-based study on a real city map by considering simple EV charging strategies that do not allow charging station reservation. Our preliminary results show that in this case public charging stations can be underutilized and more sophisticated strategies are needed to reduce range anxiety issues.