Development of the Web Platform for Management of Smart

Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles

Vitalijs Komasilovs

, Aleksejs Zacepins

, Armands Kviesis

, Corneliu Marinescu

and Ioan Serban

Department of Computer Systems, Faculty of Information Technologies, Latvia University of Agriculture, Jelgava, Latvia

Department of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania

Keywords:

Electric Vehicles, Charging Stations, Interactive Map, Smart Charging Infrastructure.

Abstract:

Shortage of fossil fuels and ecological thinking leads to shift in technologies for vehicle production. In the

future only electric vehicles (EVs) would be produced. This will lead to huge increase in number of EVs

worldwide, so it would be crucial to provide a broad public charging infrastructure. This paper exactly con-

centrates on the essential role of infrastructure in the mass implementation of electric vehicles. A focus is

placed on sharing the residential infrastructure for public usage. Paper describes authors developed Web plat-

form for sharing the information about privately owned charging stations, describing the additional option to

link station hardware with software for real-time charging data and station availability updates. Developed

platform brings together drivers of EVs and owners of the infrastructure. Developed platform is built like an

interactive map, based on Google Maps service. Together with software part, authors developed also hardware,

which is one Microgrid based on renewable energy sources with EV charging station functionality.

1 INTRODUCTION

Usage of electricity for car motors is becoming

more popular nowadays and many European coun-

tries made considerable efforts to increase a share of

electric vehicles (EVs) in the transport sector (Mor-

rissey et al., 2016). There are two main reason for

that: a) huge increase in the usage of non-renewable

energy resources can possibly result in their depletion

(Berjoza and Jurgena, 2015; Xiong et al., 2015); b)

ecological aspects (climate warning) should be taken

into account, as EVs move pollution away from ur-

ban areas (Hawkins et al., 2013). Electric vehicles

has many advantages like emission free (Hess et al.,

2012), energy efﬁcient, and noiseless mean of trans-

port (Hatton et al., 2009; Ruzmetov et al., 2013).

Rapid growth of EVs is connected to notion of Smart

cities (Schneider et al., 2008) and to the fact, that sev-

eral countries announced ban of fossil fuel vehicles.

The worlds largest car market just announced an

imminent end to gas and diesel cars, as a Chinese

ofﬁcial told the audience at an auto forum in Tianjin

that the government is working on a timetable to end

production and sales of traditional energy vehicles

(https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/

9/13/16293258/ev-revolution). Norway plans to

completely ban petrol powered cars by year 2025

(http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-

change/norway-to-ban-the-sale-of-all-fossil-fuel-

based-cars-by-2025-and-replace-with-electric-

vehicles-a7065616.html). Aside China and Norway

such countries as Netherlands, India, France, Great

Britain, Germany and others plan to stop production

of gas and diesel vehicles. It means that in our

near future only EVs will be produced. This will

signiﬁcantly increase the number of EVs on the roads

and infrastructure should be ready for comfortable

usage and charging of EVs. Already today number of

EVs is greater than 1200 thousands.

Figure 1 shows worldwide number of battery

electric vehicles in use from 2012 to 2016 (in

1,000s) (www.statista.com). But situation with

EVs varies among countries, for example in Latvia

there are only 313 electric vehicles registered

(https://csdd.lv/statistika/transportlidzekli/). Most of

them (184 EVs) appeared on the Latvian roads in year

2014, when it was possible to use European Union

funds for car purchasing. Unfortunately, nowadays

this number is not increasing, mainly because road

infrastructure is not ready. In Romania situation is

rather similar, where less than 400 EVs are registered

to this moment.

Due to mentioned facts and increase in EVs

worldwide, it is important to provide a public charg-

Komasilovs, V., Zacepins, A., Kviesis, A., Marinescu, C. and Serban, I.

Development of the Web Platform for Management of Smart Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles.

DOI: 10.5220/0006799205950599

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS 2018), pages 595-599

ISBN: 978-989-758-293-6

595

ing infrastructure that adequately caters to the needs

of all EV users (Morrissey et al., 2016). One of

the electric vehicle charging station demands is geo-

graphical dissemination (Berjoza and Jurgena, 2015)

and availability, which can be achieved by relevant

number of charging stations. Charging patterns and

available charging infrastructure have a large impact

on the way in which people use EVs (Hatton et al.,

2009). The distribution of charging stations deter-

mines EV drivers accessibility to energy sources, and

consequently affects the EV ﬂow and trafﬁc condi-

tions in the road network (Xiong et al., 2015). EVs

can be charged not only at public commercial charg-

ing stations, but also at residential houses (Xiong

et al., 2015; Hess et al., 2012; Tushar et al., 2014;

Schroeder and Traber, 2012), and sharing such private

charging plugs could be good alternative to commer-

cial stations.

Aim of this paper is to propose approach to easily

share available private EV charging stations by using

Web platform, where everyone can ﬁnd, add and view

privately available charging stations. Main advantage

of proposed system is option to ensure real time data

updates by linking hardware of charging station (in-

cluding, but not limited to data about station availabil-

ity, amount of available power, price for the charging,

etc) with user friendly Web platform. Development

and implementation of authors proposed system can

facilitate usage of EVs in countries, where EVs are

not very popular to this moment (e.g. Latvia and Ro-

mania).

There are several charging station maps already

available online or by a mobile application. Exam-

ples are: www.plugshare.com, where users can view

charging stations from all around the world, stations

can be public or residential (private). Also system has

user registration option to use all of the system func-

tions (like adding of station, making and sharing re-

views, view residential charging station details, etc).

Next example is https://openchargemap.org/. It is

the global public registry of electric vehicle charging

locations. Functionality is similar to previous one, ad-

ditionally users can use many ﬁlters by searching for

charging stations.

https://chargemap.com is another solution to see

charging stations with option to determine which sta-

tions are the most relevant to use on your route. Ac-

cess to the system is only by registering and log in. As

well mobile applications are available for download.

https://ev-charging.com is mainly showing sta-

tions in Europe, but the functionality is similar to pre-

vious ones. Reviewing already existing systems au-

thors can conclude that there are several good initia-

tives for EV users, which ease the EV charging pro-

Figure 1: Number of battery electric vehicles in use world-

wide from 2012 to 2016.

cess, but authors did not ﬁnd any system that is linked

with charging station hardware for real-time status

and data updates.

Authors idea is to provide a platform for success-

ful collaboration between EV users and persons with

electro energy availability. Such platform allows EV

users to easily plan route and choose charging sta-

tions, where to stop and charge a car.

From other hand, such system can allow station

owners to efﬁciently use their station resources. Cur-

rent development trends of charging stations show

shift to renewable energy sources (e.g. photo-voltage

panels, wind turbines, geothermal and their combi-

nations). Taking into account ﬂuctuations of avail-

able energy and its storage challenge, charging station

owners desire to use available energy as efﬁciently as

possible. One of options is to sell free energy to EV

users on the open market.

There is a need of a platform to bring together

drivers of EVs and owners of the infrastructure to

share information about charging points, available

amount of energy, capacity and charging price. This

will allow convenient charging of EVs almost every-

where. Similar to parking place monitoring and pub-

lishing of free parking lots (Zacepins et al., 2017) also

number of free charging plugs should be available on-

line, because it is not enough to know charging station

location, but also availability and price information of

particular station is crucial.

2 ARCHITECTURE OF THE WEB

PLATFORM FOR

MANAGEMENT OF THE

SMART CHARGING STATIONS

Developed platform is built like an interactive map,

based on Google Maps service. There are three sys-

tem user roles: guest, power user and administrator.

RESIST 2018 - Special Session on Resilient Smart city Transportation

596

Figure 2: System screenshot of charging stations registered

by user.

User registration and management process is main-

tained using the Auth0 platform (https://auth0.com/).

For public users (guests) basic information about ac-

tive charging stations is available, and they have read-

only access to the platform. Power users can register

EV charging stations: add description and link sta-

tion hardware to automatically update key informa-

tion, see Fig.2. In order to register owned charging

stations, user has to sign up to application via any

e-mail or Google account, administrator accepts sign

up and grands needed user rights. After registering

the grid it will appear on the public map. In addition

power users can edit own charging stations, option-

ally hide it from public view and review data update

reports.

Front-end module is built as single page Web ap-

plication using Angular 4 and Bootstrap 4 frame-

works. Front-end module provides mobile-ready user

interface for charging station management and visu-

alization. System shows general information about

charging stations, which are added by power users.

General information includes description, location,

description of charging plugs, availability, charging

price, available amount of kWh, reviews of other

users, etc.

Back-end module is built using Java technology

stack: Spring Boot 2.0 framework as system back-

bone, MongoDB 3.4 database. Functionality is cov-

ered by unit, integration and acceptance tests using

Spock 1.1 framework.

System domain structure is shown on ﬁgure 3.

Charging station owner is represented by authenti-

cated user with rights to register new charging sta-

Figure 3: Domain structure.

tions (power user role). Charging station concept in

essence is geographical location with name and other

relevant attributes, like electrical power, capability,

energy source type and charging price. In addition

it has status indicator for better management by the

owner. Charging station might have several charging

plugs available for simultaneous charging of multiple

EVs. Each plug is described by its type and status

(e.g. free, occupied, etc).

Charging station hardware is treated as external

unmanned party which pushes updates about its state

via provided API. Payload of data updates is decoded

and used for updating information of charging station

and its plugs. In addition data updates are aggregated

into report which provides valuable information for

charging station owner about its facilities (e.g. usage

patterns).

Web platform for review and testing is publicly

available at https://smart-grids.science.itf.llu.lv/.

Charging hardware linking to the Web platform is

performed via user interface. On the charging station

Edit page power user has access to API secret, which

is unique code used for sending data updates about

particular charging station. User can renew the secret

code, when it is necessary.

Below is an example of Python script which might

be used to push data updates from Raspberry PI or any

other computer to the system. First of all system has

to obtain authentication token, similar to user login,

but for unmanned system. POST request to Auth0

speciﬁed endpoint with client id, client secret and au-

dience payload is performed.

Development of the Web Platform for Management of Smart Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles

597

i m p o r t r e q u e s t s

p a y l o a d = {

’ c l i e n t i d ’ : ’< c l i e n t i d >’ ,

’ c l i e n t s e c r e t ’ : ’< c l i e n t s e c r e t >’ ,

’ a u d i e n c e ’ : ’ smar t −g r i d s −web−a p i ’ ,

’ g r a n t t y p e ’ : ’ c l i e n t c r e d e n t i a l s ’ }

a u t h = r e q u e s t s . p o s t ( ’ h t t p s : / / s m a r t −g r i d s . eu .

a u t h 0 . com / o a u t h / t o k e n ’ , p a y l o a d ) . j s o n ( )

It returns dictionary with authentication token,

which is valid for 24 hours, so there is no need to run

it for every data update, only once a day. For actual

data update following script is used. POST request to

Web platform end-point is performed. Request head-

ers contain authentication token and request payload

contains unique grid API secret key and other relevant

values provided by the hardware in JSON format.

i m p o r t r e q u e s t s

p a y l o a d = {

’ g r i d K ey ’ : ’<u n i q u e −g r i d −a p i −s e c r e t >’ ,

’ f i r s t V a l u e ’ : 1 2 3 . 4 5 6 ,

’ s e c o nd V a l u e ’ : ’ Lorem i p sum ’ ,

’ t h i r d V a l u e ’ : [ ’ l i s t ’ , ’ of ’ , ’ v a l u e s ’ ] }

h e a d e r s = {

’ a u t h o r i z a t i o n ’ : a u t h [ ’ t o k e n t y p e ’ ] + ’ ’ +

a u t h [ ’ a c c e s s t o k e n ’ ] ,

’ c o n t e n t −t y p e ’ : ’ a p p l i c a t i o n / j s o n ’ }

r e q u e s t s . p o s t ( ’ h t t p s : / / s m a r t −g r i d s . s c i e n c e . i t f .

l l u . l v / a p i / u p d a t e s ’ , j s o n = p ay l oa d , h e a d e r s =

h e a d e r s )

Successfully saved data updates appears on grid’s

report page.

Next section describes a working example of such

charging station hardware, that can be linked to the

Web platform to provide data updates and get inputs

for effective operation autonomously.

3 EXAMPLE OF ONE SMART

CHARGING STATION LINKING

WITH THE PLATFORM

Within this research, one Microgrid (MG), based

on renewable energy sources with EV charging sta-

tion functions is developed and is fully functioning.

In general, charging station has three internal en-

ergy sources: small wind turbine (emulated), photo-

voltage array and Li-ion battery storage and connec-

tion to the common 230V/50Hz power grid as fourth

energy source. The system is capable to choose ap-

propriate source (or multiple sources) depending on

foreseen energy inﬂow and current demand of charg-

ing power. Depending on public power grid usage

price for charging is ﬂuctuating, which also affects

Figure 4: Diagram of the MG charging station for EVs.

source selection strategy. Charging station is located

in Brasov, Romania in the Transylvania University.

Charging station has 6kW rated power, 16kWh energy

capability and single-phase 230V EV socket (Level 1

and Level 2). Schematic diagram of the charging sta-

tion is demonstrated in Fig.4.

Hardware design and setup peculiarities is out of

scope of current paper. The only focusing compo-

nent of the charging station is network communica-

tion interface (full-size or micro computer) witch is

connected to the Internet and is capable to send data

updates using example Python scripts or similar so-

lutions. On ﬁgure 4 it is marked as MG (Microgrid)

manager.

Currently charging station operates in ”on-

demand” mode: energy needs are considered only

when there is a charging request. However system

could operate in much efﬁcient way by planning and

forecasting energy demands for near future. In this,

charging station reservations might be an input for

energy consumption prediction. This feature is also

planned for implementation on the Web platform.

That way data ﬂow is organized in bi-directional way:

charging station updates current status and parameters

on the Web platform in return receiving user reserva-

tions for better operational planning.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Within this research Web platform for collaboration

between EV drivers and charging station owners is

developed. Platform ensures efﬁcient information

RESIST 2018 - Special Session on Resilient Smart city Transportation

598

ﬂow from charging station hardware (real time sta-

tus updates) and mobile-ready public information site.

Web platform uses universal data exchange protocols,

which makes hardware linking simple and convenient

for end user (owner).

An example case of such charging station linking

to the platform is described.

Usage of this Web platform facilitates dissemina-

tion of residential charging stations with renewable

energy sources, which in turn improves EV driver ex-

perience, comfort and availability.

There are several future development directions

available. One is directly related to improvements

of the Web platform itself: a) development of charg-

ing station reservation functionality, b) development

of user feedback section, c) extension of reporting

functionality to provide useful information both to

EV drivers and owners of charging stations. Another

direction is to implement multi-grid charging station

hardware in urban environment and link it to the de-

scribed Web platform. Hardware implementation de-

tails are out of scope of this research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Scientiﬁc research, publication and presentation are

supported by the ERANet-LAC Project ”Enabling re-

silient urban transportation systems in smart cities

(RETRACT, ELAC2015/T10-0761)”.

For Romania the ﬁnancing Agency is Roma-

nian National Authority for Research and Innovation,

CCCDI UEFISCDI, within PNCDI III programme

frame.

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