SPARC

The rise of electric cars

Worldwide, governments are starting to give incentives to promote the use of (hybrid) electrical vehicles to achieve cleaner and more energy-efficient road transport with a low carbon footprint.

Through tax/VAT reductions and free additional services — such as free parking, free battery charging or lower traffic congestion taxes — private users, public organizations and car fleet operators are stimulated to adopt the plug-in (hybrid) electrical car.

Research

While the first charge stations are being deployed, and the autonomy of batteries are being evaluated, still a number of challenges remain to be addressed e.g.

• how to optimize the charging process in favor of renewable, fluctuating energy sources
• how to obtain seamless driver (or car) identification and fraud-sensitive measuring of the charged energy (anywhere a car is charged).

Within this ICON project, it is the aim of plug-in electrical vehicle operators (e.g. car and battery leasing companies) and car parking providers (e.g. private parking companies) to jointly address novel services that should allow to bring the electrical vehicle to a first critical mass of end-users:

1. services for fraud-sensitive measuring and billing of battery charging
   
   
2. services for optimized, coordinated battery charging of large groups of cars using a maximum of renewable energy.

Services

These novel ICT services will have to plug into the smart power grid architecture, and therefore an extendable service deployment architecture is required that allows service components to be distributed across home gateways, vehicles, public charge stations and the back-end systems of PHEV operators and smart grid operators.

This project therefore explicitly addresses the definition of a novel service architecture – which offers OEM-independent battery charging services exploiting ongoing standardization efforts -  and targets a proof-of-concept demonstration of the underlying ICT architectures, smart charging algorithms and user-friendly interfaces.

Within this project socio-technical an socio-economic studies are balanced with technical challenges to define a new, secure service architecture and intelligent algorithms that give drivers of electrical vehicles a seamless charging experience, and to allow the involved actors to cost-effectively manage their part of the service chain.

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