Designing innovative transport systems, electric and automated on priority corridors

This study focuses on two great technologies improvements, they are vehicle automation and newest fast charging methods that could enable new and innovative transport systems. Automated and electric vehicles could will enable first/last mile efficient transport services, economically and environmentally sustainable that could be useful to improve transportation services in rural sprawled areas with a low density of transport demand. It is proposed an innovative system concerning electric and automated vehicles in specific paths called priority corridors, it is described a methodology of designing leaving the detailed analysis and impacts analysis to future studies. Automation, Internet of Things and smartphones are revolutionising mobility and with it the economy. With such mobility revolution all aspects of our life, economic, social and environmental will be impacted. Automated vehicles can be deployed as personal vehicles or as shared vehicles; while personal vehicles are not yet ready for deployment shared vehicles are. This work aims to propose an innovative transport system with off the shelf technologies and a methodology of design dealing with vehicle automation, current designing methods and environmental impacts. The methodology foresees six steps, they could be repeated with an iterative change of parameters in order to compare different results. These steps are: Parameters and input data, Itinerary analysis and corridors identification, Corridor choice and speed profile generation, Vehicle choice and fleet dimensioning, Electric traction needs and specifications, Results evaluation. Four categories of results are considered: vehicles and operators needed, energy consumption, transportation and socio-economic evaluation. After the results calculation, it is required an evaluation of them. Methodology is applied to Mentana, a little town in the outskirts of Rome. Mentana has only one corridor that links city centre to train station be distant eight kilometres. Economic results are positive, revenues cover operative costs and the whole system doesn’t require subsides

The Critical Role of Public Charging Infrastructure

Editors: Peter Fox-Penner, PhD, Z. Justin Ren, PhD, David O. JermainA decade after the launch of the contemporary global electric vehicle (EV) market, most cities face a major challenge preparing for rising EV demand. Some cities, and the leaders who shape them, are meeting and even leading demand for EV infrastructure. This book aggregates deep, groundbreaking research in the areas of urban EV deployment for city managers, private developers, urban planners, and utilities who want to understand and lead change

A novel ensemble method for electric vehicle power consumption forecasting: Application to the Spanish system

The use of electric vehicle across the world has become one of the most challenging issues for environmental policies. The galloping climate change and the expected running out of fossil fuels turns the use of such non-polluting cars into a priority for most developed countries. However, such a use has led to major concerns to power companies, since they must adapt their generation to a new scenario, in which electric vehicles will dramatically modify the curve of generation. In this paper, a novel approach based on ensemble learning is proposed. In particular, ARIMA, GARCH and PSF algorithms' performances are used to forecast the electric vehicle power consumption in Spain. It is worth noting that the studied time series of consumption is non-stationary and adds difficulties to the forecasting process. Thus, an ensemble is proposed by dynamically weighting all algorithms over time. The proposal presented has been implemented for a real case, in particular, at the Spanish Control Centre for the Electric Vehicle. The performance of the approach is assessed by means of WAPE, showing robust and promising results for this research field.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Proyectos ENE2016-77650-R, PCIN-2015-04 y TIN2017-88209-C2-R

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

On M2M Micropayments : A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs)

Smart Vehicle to Grid Interface Project: Electromobility Management System Architecture and Field Test Results

This paper presents and discusses the electromobility management system developed in the context of the SMARTV2G project, enabling the automatic control of plug-in electric vehicles' (PEVs') charging processes. The paper describes the architecture and the software/hardware components of the electromobility management system. The focus is put in particular on the implementation of a centralized demand side management control algorithm, which allows remote real time control of the charging stations in the field, according to preferences and constraints expressed by all the actors involved (in particular the distribution system operator and the PEV users). The results of the field tests are reported and discussed, highlighting critical issues raised from the field experience.Comment: To appear in IEEE International Electric Vehicle Conference (IEEE IEVC 2014