WhatIF Application: Moving Electrically without an Electric Vehicle

According to several recent studies, the overhead caused by charging operations to the users' daily activities constitutes one of the main issues discouraging the purchasing of an Electric Vehicle (EV). At present, multiple factors contribute to such overhead, including the limited EV range, the duration of the charging phase, and the non-uniform coverage of the Equipment Vehicle Service Stations (EVSSs) in most areas of the world. Although the situation is going to improve in the long term thanks to the technological advances of the EVs and of the charging infrastructures, ICT-based solutions are needed to minimize the overhead in the short term. To this aim, in this paper we propose the WhatIF application, a software that allows the planning and simulation of EV-related scenarios. Through a mobile client, the users of our system can register their daily journeys, including driving activities and planned stops. A back-end module allows verifying the feasibility of a journey with an EV, scheduling the (eventual) recharging operations during the planned stops. A feasibility energy-optimal algorithm minimizing the overall charged energy is proposed. The performance of the WhatIF application has been tested over a large-scale simulated EV scenario (i.e. the Italian Emilia-Romagna region), considering realistic road topology, EVSSs locations, EV battery models and mobility patterns. Simulation results indicate that 76% of the EVs are able to complete their journeys when scheduling charging operations during the stops, hence confirming the effectiveness of the WhatIF application in mitigating the overhead of EV mobility.