REView: A Unified Telemetry Platform for Electric Vehicles and Charging Infrastructure

Charging stations networks and connected vehicles play a pivotal role in the advent of smart cities and smart grids. A cornerstone of these infrastructures is often a platform or a service that handles the copious amounts of data generated, processes and saves it for monitoring and analyses purposes. In this contribution, we present a software platform, that we named as REView, that automatically collects, analyses, and reviews live and recorded data from electric vehicles (EVs) as well as from EV supply equipment (EVSE or “charging stations”). It also provides a unified monitoring platform for infrastructures that are both modular and scalable. For analysis purposes, the data described in this chapter has been collected from the Western Australian Electric Vehicle Trial and the WA Charging Station Trial. A secure web portal was also designed with different viewing perspectives for electric vehicle users, charging station users and charging station operators. REView includes presentation of informative statistics about a user’s driving efficiency and the energy use of an EV; and then compares the collected data with the average of all other users’ similar data. It further includes a smartphone application for live monitoring and producing itemized billing. In this chapter, we discuss the development of REView, including mechanisms to generate and collect the information. Finally, we show and discuss various aspects of the visualized data itself, including charging time, charging duration, energy used, as well as utilization metrics of the charging infrastructure. We promote an open source approach to charging station software development. Our work also illustrates a single-software backend to handle multiple stations from different manufacturers, promoting competition and streamlining the integration of charging technologies into other devices. The results obtained from this network and platform have ultimately enabled us to perform quantitative investigations towards the driving and charging behaviours, as well as the overall electric vehicle trends around Perth in Australia.

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