A Two-Layer Trip Chain Model for Commuting Electric Vehicles

Due to the requirements of future sustainable transportation, the number of electric vehicles is increasing rapidly in recent years. The increased electric vehicle charging requirements have put pressure on local distribution networks, but also provide opportunities for the utilization of those flexible energy storage resources. And modeling electric vehicle driving and charging behavior is the key to estimate the charging load and further explore the potential of providing grid services. Therefore, the modeling of driving and charging behavior of electric vehicles is widely focused and different trip chain models have been proposed. However, the lack of sufficient real-world data is often the greatest barrier to the implementation of these models. In this paper, a two-layer trip chain model for commuting electric vehicles is proposed, where the bottom-layer model is similar to conventional trip chain models, but its parameters are generated from top-layer model. By introducing structured distributions of the bottom-layer model parameters to top layer model, only simple survey data are required for the model calibration; therefore, the data requirements of trip chain model are largely reduced. The driving and charging behaviors of commuting electric vehicles related to an office building are simulated, and the results show the feasibility of the proposed method.