An Integrated Simulation Framework to Model Electric Vehicles Operations and Services

At present, battery charging operations constitute one of the most critical obstacles toward a large-scale uptake of Electric Mobility (EM), due to performance issues and implementation complexities. Although several solutions based on the utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and on mobile applications have been investigated to assist the Electric Vehicles (EVs) drivers and to coordinate the charging operations, there is still the problem of how to evaluate and validate such solutions on realistic scenarios, due to the lack of accurate simulators integrating vehicular mobility, wireless communication and battery charging/discharging models. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap, by proposing a novel EV simulation platform that can assist the pre-deployment of charging infrastructures and services on realistic, large-scale EM scenarios. The simulation platform, realized within the ARTEMIS EU project “Internet of Energy for Electric Mobility“ (IoE), supports two utilization modes, i.e. evaluation of EM scenarios and immersive emulation of EM-related mobile applications, thanks to a semantic architecture through which virtual and real components can be integrated in a seamless way. We provide three major contributions with respect to the state of the art. First, we extend the existing co-simulation platform composed by SUMO (vehicular traffic simulator) and OMNET++ (network simulator) with realistic models of EVs, EVSEs and ontology-based communication protocols that enable the deployment of city-wide mobile services (e.g. charging reservation). Second, we validate the battery model against the consumptions data of target EVs, and we evaluate the operations of EVs on a large-scale scenario (the city of Bologna), by analyzing the effectiveness of the charging reservation process and the resulting impact to the smart grid. Finally, we introduce the Mobile Application Zoo (MAZ), a sandbox through which EM-related mobile ap- lications can be seamlessly integrated within the simulation platform in order to be validated on virtual environments before their deployment on real scenarios, and we describe the implementation of an Android app for battery monitoring and charging reservation.