Smart Charging Solutions for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles. Группа авторов

Enterprises. The first phase of FAME, FAME I, was started in 2015 and completed on March 31st, 2019. FAME-II started on April 1st, 2019 and is planned to be completed by March 31st, 2022 [60, 61]. FAME aims to promote eco-friendly vehicles, including electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles, and EV buyers, increasing the demand and production of EVs. The promotion includes providing incentives to both the manufacturer and buyers by reducing taxes and electricity cost. Further, support to set up manufacturing plants for EVs and related technologies are also promoted.

       1.5.5.2 Manufacturers

      Manufacturers design, develop, and sell the products. In smart charging, the products include EVs, equipment to support power exchange between the grid and EVs, products that are required to develop the communication infrastructure, and the accessories to support the maintenance of all the products and equipment in the smart charging infrastructure. Manufacturers are provided support by policymakers in developing EV infrastructure subsidies for electricity cost, lease of land, and taxes.

       1.5.5.3 Service and Support Providers

      All the equipment and products used in smart charging need services, such as the internet and electricity, to operate. Further, regular maintenance to reduce the capital cost of replacement due to damage is required. Hence, service and support providers are an integral component. The manufacturer and policymakers consider inputs from service and support providers in both framing policies and manufacturing products. The manufacturer ensures that spare parts of their product are readily available to the support providers. The personnel involved is trained to check and repair by the manufacturers.

       1.5.5.4 Consumers

      Consumers are the front divers for the implementation of smart charging infrastructure. The demand for EVs and their supporting products and equipment is wholly dependent on consumers’ needs. Hence, the manufacturer, policymakers, and service providers do promotions, provide incentives, and assure consumers’ maturity and reliability. The consumers also draw constraints, such as charging speed, battery life, and cost of replacing batteries, before buying an EV. If the demand for a product by the consumers’ increases, it shows the technology’s acceptance [62, 63].

An appropriate business model with policies benefitting all the stakeholders and fulfilling consumers’ requirements will be needed for the implementation of smart charging [64].

      1.5.6 Market

      With the maturity in EV technologies and push of governments worldwide for e-mobility, the EV market has expanded in the past few years. Research to reduce range anxiety, enhance the trust of EV users, reduce the weight of the battery, and establish user-friendly charging stations are a few ways the EV and supporting equipment manufacturers are working to build a momentum of sales in the market. Oil and gas companies are also preparing to operate towards sustainable e-mobility. The smart charging infrastructure market is reported to segmented into EV sales, mobility services, electricity sales to charge EVs, installation and maintenance of charging infrastructure, operation of smart charging stations and the utility grid, and ancillary services [21, 65].

      EV sales include the different types of EVs sold in the market, such as consumer vehicles, private vehicles, public transport service vehicles, and heavy vehicles. Mobility services include app development and management to provide services at the users’ fingertips, perform data collection and analysis to increase reliability in operation, EV fleet management, booking of slots, and much more. The market keeps evolving with competition between both well-known and emerging companies, each of them seeking to increase their share of the market.

1.6 Enablers of Smart Charging

      Smart charging requires enablers to implement it. Consumers and technology are two important enablers. The consumers have a varied aspect of expectations and interpretation for any new technology released in the market. The success and failure of the product depends on the acceptance of consumers. On the other hand, recent times have experienced a rapid transition in technology with new products with desired functionalities released almost daily. The technology required for smart charging should add functionalities that make the system intelligent in operation. Artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics, popularly called Big Data, are technology enablers [20, 66, 67].

When looking into EV technology, the driving range, charging speed, and availability of charging stations to charge while traveling are the three main constraints for large scale acceptance of electrification of transportation [68]. However, transportation is one of the basic requirements, hence, EV penetration is certain if policymakers’ direct policies that incentivize EV users and manufacturers. The flexibility requirements of each individual will be different, but a customer may compromise if usage results in earning [49, 64, 65, 67]. Apart from policymakers, the PSO should also sincerely participate by giving incentives in electricity pricing for EV users prioritizing coordinated and smart charging. A comprehensive approach to promote the use of EVs should be taken with due consideration of the challenges: driving range, charging time, availability of charging stations, the health of EV batteries, and buying cost of EVs and batteries.

      The previous sections and subsections have described the requirements of intelligent systems for the deployment of smart charging architectures. The development of intelligent systems demands data. The data in the electricity grid is generally saved in separate database servers which are used for future planning and expansion of the operation [57, 69, 70]. Hence, designing an intelligent system using AI at the electricity grid side can be attempted, but, when a developer looks to develop intelligent systems for the consumers, lack of data is a big challenge. Hence, the digitalization of the complete smart charging infrastructure can be an initial step to plan for smart charging [67].

      Digitalization with an assurance of data analytics can help in developing business models, components, software, and connected hardware and an understanding of the expectations of the consumers. The data logged, when analyzed, can reveal various day and night charging patterns, user preferences, the requirement of power to charge, and various ancillary services that can be attached to EVs [71]. Further, the deployment of communication architecture requires decisions to be made on the communication channel to be used. The data analyzed can also help to provide useful insights to decide the data rate. Based on the data rate, communication channels can be selected. Thus, data analytics and AI are important enablers of the smart charging system.

      Apart from technologies that add intelligence, billing and payment services are also an essential part of smart charging systems. Advancements in technologies such as blockchain, which provides secured transactions and maintains a ledger, are being utilized. Blockchains have distributed architectures and the operation is based on secured databases that maintain a record of all transactions. The transactions are verified by the users’ computational or connecting devices (computer, mobile phone, or any smart devices) called nodes. The technology is preferred to be used in smart charging systems due to security and distributed architecture.

Thus, blockchain technology has also emerged as an enabler in smart charging systems [67, 69].

1.7 Control Architectures

      Communication channels interconnect the components in a smart charging system, but the interconnection does not result in a successful operation. The operation requires controllers which either command centrally or are distributed in the subsystems to make decisions. The next subsections will describe different architectures in which the controller is deployed in smart charging systems for smooth monitoring and operation [10, 13, 15, 27, 31, 33, 43].

      1.7.1 Centralized

The centralized control system for smart charging systems demands robust communication infrastructure. In a centralized control, necessary data is transmitted from each connected entity to the central controller. The controller performs decision making by determining