An Integrated Simulation Framework to Model Electric Vehicle 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 and on mobile applications have been investigated to assist electric vehicle (EV) drivers and to coordinate 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 in the predeployment of charging infrastructures and services on realistic large-scale EM scenarios. The simulation platform, which is realized within the ARTEMIS EU project “Internet of Energy for Electric Mobility,” supports two utilization modes, i.e., evaluation of EM scenarios and immersive emulation of EM-related mobile applications, due 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 cosimulation platform composed of SUMO (a vehicular traffic simulator) and OMNET++ (a network simulator) with realistic models of EVs, electric vehicle supply equipment, 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, Italy), by analyzing the effectiveness of the charging reservation process and the resulting impact to the smart grid. Finally, we introduce the Mobile Application Zoo, which is a sandbox through which EM-related mobile applications can be seamlessly integrated within the simulation platform to be validated on virtual environments before their deployment on real scenarios, and we describe the implementation of an Android application for battery monitoring and charging reservation.