OCPP Charge Points Simulation

Abstract

In a world where climate change is the spotlight of Belgian companies, an increasing number of industries use a fleet of electric vehicles to lower their carbon emissions. In order to take care of the increasing number of electric cars, companies install the infrastructure necessary to recharge them. This high number of charge points needs management to be able to balance the load of the energy consumption, especially if the company uses renewable energy or needs a lot of energy for its activity. Without management, there can be an overload of the local infrastructure, a high energy cost due to higher rates during peak periods, a reduction in the use renewable energy due to intermittency and a possible strain in the grid's stability. Sm@rt Car-E is one of the solutions to manage the load balancing of such charge points. It allows to monitor the charge points utilization, by analyzing the different users and the charging curves, balancing the loads, and many more aspects of the charging. The simulator implemented is a tool to simulate hundreds of OCPP compliant charge points in order to reduce the reliance on hardware, help to develop new functionalities in Sm@rt Car-E or find bugs in the current code. One of the simulator's strength is in its ability to accelerate the simulations while keeping the functionalities of Sm@rt Car-E. It also allows for a high customization of the simulations with the charging profiles and vehicle characteristics. This thesis is organized as follows: (1)Introduction of the context (2)Problem Statement (3)Analysis of previous work, state of the art of charge points and OCPP (4)Description of the used technologies and preliminary code (5)Implementation of the real-time and event-based simulators (the choices made, the structure of the code, the experiments and discussions over different relevant criteria to prove the validity of the simulations) (6)Business analysis