A Monitoring System for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations: A Prototype in the Amazon

Abstract

Among the main problems faced in the context of electric mobility today, the management and monitoring of electric vehicle charging stations, the integration between the diverse types of technologies that make up its architecture, and its low scalability stand out. Therefore, we will present the implementation and complete integration of an electric vehicle charging system in an electric mobility pilot project being executed in the Amazon region in Brazil. Therefore, a literature review of related works will be presented, and its entire implementation will be addressed, from the charging infrastructure, through its back-end system and its Internet of things platform, to its front-end web system for monitoring charging stations. In addition, a complete prototype is created with a real testbed to verify the scalability of the implemented physical system. Based on the testbed evaluations performed, we observe that the implemented system performs well in receiving and sending data from up to 160 electric vehicle charging stations, achieving an average consumption of 26% for CPU and 95% for memory. In addition, it is important to mention that the deployed system supports horizontal scalability, enabling the connection of more charging stations and making it ideal for other integrated systems similar to ours. Based upon the main results obtained with the implemented system, the possibility of carrying out the management and monitoring of charging stations stands out; the integration of different technologies, from the back end and IoT middleware to its front end; a system that supports scalability, enabling the connection of more charging stations; and a reference architecture for charging station management and monitoring systems for the Amazon region.

Keywords

• electric vehicles
• open charge point protocol
• IoT platform
• Kubernetes