A General Model for EV Drivers’ Charging Behavior

The increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) due to technical advancements and environmental concerns requires wide deployment of public charging stations (CSs). In order to accelerate the EV penetration and predict the future CSs requirements and adopt proper policies for their deployment, studying the charging behavior of EV drivers is inevitable. This paper introduces a stochastic model that takes into consideration the behavioral characteristics of EV drivers in particular, in terms of their reaction to the EV battery charge level when deciding to charge or disconnect at a CS. The proposed model is applied in two case studies to describe the resultant collective behavior of EV drivers in a community using real field EV data obtained from a major North American campus network and part of London urban area. The model fits well to the datasets by tuning the model parameters. The sensitivity analysis of the model indicates that changes in the behavioral parameters affect the statistical characteristics of charging duration, vehicle connection time, and EV demand profile, which has a substantial effect on congestion status in CSs. This proposed model is then applied in several scenarios to simulate the congestion status in public parking lots and predict the future charging points needed to guarantee the appropriate level of service quality. The results show that studying and controlling the EV drivers' behavior leads to a significant saving in CS capacity and results in consumer satisfaction, thus, profitability of the station owners.