Architectural and Semantic Models for EV Charging Infrastructure

The significant rise in Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption for transportation necessitates a reliable, safe, and secure EV Charging Infrastructure (EVCIS) to avoid potentially catastrophic outcomes. A thorough understanding of the EVCIS infrastructure is essential for this, but despite the complexities of the infrastructure and the expert knowledge required to understand it, existing literature only provides a simplistic representation of EVCIS that lacks the granularity level essential for analyzing its security vulnerabilities. By reviewing standards and literature, and through discussions with stakeholders and domain experts, a detailed architecture model of the EVCIS is presented using a standard enterprise architectural language - ArchiMate - that explicitly shows individual hardware and firmware components and their interactions. Furthermore, the architecture is complemented by explanation of the individual EVCIS components, their relationships and the commonly used protocols between different controllers, as well as vulnerabilities associated with these components. This knowledge is formally represented as an ontology, evciArch with the aim that this semantic model can be expanded and used to analyze the threat landscape of EVs and EVCIS. This initial work is intended as a tool to bridge the gap between academia and industry by providing a practical and reusable architecture model, and a standardized semantic model that can be used for deeper understanding of EVs and EVCIS and feed into future work of security analysis of their complex landscape.