Nand Kishor - ICT for Electric Vehicle Integration with the Smart Grid

Information technology and the massive use of data is improving peoples lives by modernising infrastructures as transportation, energy and health, and promoting new citizen-centred services aiming at building the city of the future []. Transport is on the brink of a new era of smart mobility where infrastructure, transport means and users are increasingly interconnected to achieve optimised management models involving higher efficiency, lower costs while bringing less environmental impact. Innovation efforts are focused on applying physical internet to create improved model for holistic mobility management by means of dynamical capability to respond to a wide set of parameters, while empowering sustainability through the reduction of carbon footprint.

The urban and interurban mobility environment has been evolving in recent decades. Traditional factors that have been pushing these changes have been changes in motorisation, residential and urban sprawl, and the spatial distribution of the population, the workplaces and other societal relevant locations. Currently, more than a half of the world population is living in cities, reaching almost 72% in the European Union (EU), and it is estimated that over 80% of the European population will live in urban areas by 2020. The growth of the cities will also generate new city mobility challenges to be solved.

These factors have had an impact in the key areas of transportation, efficient mobility, road safety, security and environmental sustainability. And different technological developments have followed these changes in different fields, in an attempt to mitigate the problems arising in these areas:

• Problems with daily congestion in urban areas, overload of the public transportation system, increase in the cost of mobility services (not only monetary, but also in terms of energy consumption and impact on the environment)

• An immediate and direct increase in the number of incidents, accidents, injured and fatalities related with transportation

• An immediate impact in the increase of emissions, pollutants, noise and energy consumption basically, fossil fuels

• An increase in the risk of incidents related with the management and control of traffic and mobility in general

• Logistics and supply chain management is about providing the required products at the right place at the right time and at minimum cost. Doing so in an urban area is very challenging due to higher complexity environment. Additionally, urban logistics negatively affects the lives of the citizens living in these cities, causing traffic congestion and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and affecting their health due to the air pollution and noise emissions. Another important factor in urban logistics is the recent growth of e-commerce (around 14% year-over-year growth in the EU), which has increased the total number of freight movements in the city.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), understood as the systems that apply the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) which include electronics, automatic control, computer processing and communications to the field of transport, are aimed at addressing these key areas of transportation. Thus, they can be extended to all modes of transportation and all their elements can be considered: vehicles, infrastructures and users.

In the last decades, several initiatives have had a profound impact on the way mobility is managed. Continuous development of ITS has made available the mechanisms to increase their awareness of the traffic environment to users and mobility managers. This increased awareness of the traffic and its environment conditions is an effective tool towards improving mobility efficiency, safety and environmental sustainability, but only if the parties involved actively share information. And this is after all the main reason for the ITS, Cooperative ITS and Cooperative Services concepts. The European Commission (EC) has been very active in the activities towards the improvement of aspects of road mobility efficiency, road safety and sustainability via the promotion of ITS development. At this point, transportation is on the verge of large-scale transformation through new electric vehicles, big digital platforms, governments laws and the advances in software, data and sensing leading in new smarter integrated systems ().

Figure 1.1 Cooperative systems. Area of application

Interestingly, as technologies have allowed a better knowledge about the mobility environment, new trends in urban and interurban mobility have been identified, or have emerged as consequences of changes in other fields. The most important of these are:

• Electric mobility. The increase in the awareness of the limitations and dangers of the fuel-based mobility has had, as a consequence, a rapid development of the technologies related to electric mobility, from energy production and storage, to recharging points, etc.

• Mode shifts in mobility. Due to a combination of reasons, it is becoming increasingly less attractive to own a private vehicle. Particularly in urban areas, the increasing offer of car-sharing and car-pooling options is indicative that mobility is opening to a true shift in mobility modes.

• Connected and automated mobility. As a consequence of the trends towards electric and alternative mobility modes, there is more need than before of a true real-time dynamic awareness of the mobility environment. Initially conceived as awareness around a vehicle primarily for safety purposes, communication technologies and services for vehicles (ITS, C-ITS) have increasingly played a role in urban and interurban traffic management.

If we move a few years ahead with these trends, it is not difficult to picture a large proportion of purely electrical and shared/pooled vehicles, those being the core of the mobility offer in the cities. On the other hand, while the number of charging locations has increased, it is still not a completely widespread network, and definitely the number of parking spaces inside the cities is limited. It is positive though that vehicles can share their stored energy capacity, and that the private vehicle owners mostly charge their vehicles overnight at home.

It is clear that the communication needs are far from what is necessary to fulfil this scenario. We have potentially hundreds of thousand users making use of a large pool of available cars from different companies (and without counting advancing on the ideas of shared-cargo or advanced electric-based logistic urban services), with limited charging points and parking places. The need for real-time accurate information is critical, and not only about the vehicles themselves, but also about their availability, the charging levels and potential to provide energy back to the network and where and how to do this. The number of involved stakeholders in these exchanges is also relevant.

This all makes communications a central piece is pushing an all-electrical, connected/automated urban mobility scenario ahead. This chapter will present some of the technologies used today to achieve this scenario, and what seem to be the trends to address the issues that are offered Connected Vehicles and especially connected Autonomous Driving (AD) vehicles bring a whole new ecosystem with new requirements on the Cloud and the network architecture to support the new workloads and to satisfy the real-time service requirements [).