Smart electric vehicle charging management for smart cities

In recent years, attraction to alternative urban mobility paradigms such as electric vehicles (EVs) is increasing since EVs can significantly minimise fossil fuel dependency and reduce carbon emission in urban areas. Nonetheless, there are several barriers toward widespread adoption of EVs. Moreover, as EV penetration increases in urban areas, uncoordinated charging may cause power outage. Deployment of EV charging network can allow EVs to communicate with the service provider to coordinate charging activities. Taking into account, increased growth of EVs, number of charging facilities will be inadequate in urban areas, so efficient EV charging management is required for managing and allocating scarce charging station (CS) resources. In this study, the authors have designed and implemented a smart EV charging management system utilizing charging strategy that includes effective reservation management and efficient slot allocation of CSs. Considering composite cost that includes waiting time, estimated charging time, estimated charging cost, user discontent factor and CS congestion impact in such a method, their scheduling scheme shall furnish a set of optimal solutions. Viewing user discontent factor and average waiting time, they have evaluated performance of proposed strategy. The proposed charging strategy is effective than the existing one in terms of average waiting time.