Optimal Design of Electric Vehicle Battery Swap Charging Station for Smart Cities in Saudi Arabia

The adoption of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) in Saudi Arabia is gaining traction, necessitating the establishment of innovative charging solutions such as swap battery electric vehicle charging stations (SBEVCS). The research proposes optimal design of SBEVCS that minimizes the waiting time of charging and improves the energy mismatch in distribution network considering travel behavior in Saudi Arabia since limited research addressed that. In this work, SBEVCS has been modeled using Discrete Event Simulation (DES) that considers the uncertainty of driving behavior in Electric Vehicles (EVs) such as station arrival rates, charging energy required, and waiting time of charging. A field measurement of conventional vehicles using gasoline station is conducted in Makkah, Saudi Arabia to overcome the gap in related work, to estimate the driving behavior of vehicles in Saudi Arabia. The outcomes from this field measurement have been considered as inputs for DES modeling for SBEVCS in order to obtain the optimal design of this station in terms of number of swap battery servers, number of batteries in reserved storage, and EV charging load profile of SBEVCS to support its integration to Saudi electrical grid. The results of DES show that the arrival rates and the penetration level of EVs have the main impact on designing SBEVCS. 15 – 30 reserved batteries are required in small SBEVCS, where 40 – 60 reserved batteries are required in medium SBEVCS. In large SBEVCS at least 80 reserved batteries are required in order to guarantee the charging quality of service, so service time does not exceed 6 minutes. The outcomes of this work support the development of SBEVCS in Saudi Arabia as a crucial step towards fostering an efficient and user-friendly BEV ecosystem.