Intelligent Charging Infrastructure Design for Connected and Autonomous Electric Vehicles in Smart Cities

For an environmentally sustainable future, electric vehicle (EV) adoption rates have been growing exponentially around the world. There is a pressing need for constructing smart charging infrastructures that can successfully integrate the large influx of connected and autonomous EVs (CAEVs) into the smart grids. To fulfill the aspirations for massive deployments of autonomous mobility on demand (AMoD) services, the proposed fast and secure framework will also need to address the long charging times and long waiting times of static charging, and will need to consider dynamic wireless charging as a viable solution for the CAEVs on the move. In this paper, a three-layer hierarchical charging infrastructure design that has interoperability with existing static wired charging systems and future wireless static and dynamic charging systems for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is presented. Charging request and reservation message frames are proposed for one of the Internet of Things application (IoT) that can enable this system to dynamically and automatically schedule charging reservations of CAEVS over one or more charging networks of different types with the shortest possible route to the destination of an AMoD trip. The hardware independent system design can detect misalignment and speed issue errors of the connected vehicles on the wireless charging pads. It employs vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle to grid (V2G) communications with secure fog and cloud computing for faster computation and lower latencies. Finally, the proposed dynamic wireless charging network (DWCN) recommendation tool is analyzed, and its suggestions for building the proposed DWCN enables implementers to achieve the desired charge delivery performance at the lowest cost possible. The future proof system is designed to be operational with both shared and non-shared CAEVs and their AMoD trips in smart cities.