As a key pillar of smart transportation in smart city applications, electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming increasingly popular for their contribution in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One of the key challenges, however, is the strain on power grid infrastructure that comes with large-scale EV deployment. The solution to this lies in utilization of smart scheduling algorithms to manage the growing public charging demand. Using data-driven tools and machine learning algorithms to learn the EV charging behavior can improve scheduling algorithms. Researchers have focused on using historical charging data for predictions of behavior such as departure time and energy needs. However, variables such as weather, traffic, and nearby events, which have been neglected to a large extent, can perhaps add meaningful representations, and provide better predictions. Therefore, in this paper we propose the usage of historical charging data in conjunction with weather, traffic, and events data to predict EV session duration and energy consumption using popular machine learning algorithms including random forest, SVM, XGBoost and deep neural networks. The best predictive performance is achieved by an ensemble learning model, with SMAPE scores of 9.9% and 11.6% for session duration and energy consumptions, respectively, which improves upon the existing works in the literature. In both predictions, we demonstrate a significant improvement compared to previous work on the same dataset and we highlight the importance of traffic and weather information for charging behavior predictions.

As the smart city applications are moving from conceptual models to development phase, smart transportation is one of smart cities applications and it is gaining ground nowadays. Electric Vehicles (EVs) are considered one of the major pillars of smart transportation applications. EVs are ever growing in popularity due to their potential contribution in reducing dependency on fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. However, large-scale deployment of EV charging stations poses multiple challenges to the power grid and public infrastructure. To overcome the issue of prolonged charging time, the simple solution of deploying more charging stations to increase charging capacity does not work due to the strain on power grids and physical space limitations. Therefore, researchers have focused on developing smart scheduling algorithms to manage the demand for public charging using modeling and optimization. More recently, there has been a growing interest in data-driven approaches in modeling EV charging. Consequently, researchers are looking to identify consumer charging behavior pattern that can provide insights and predictive analytics capability. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review for the use of supervised and unsupervised Machine Learning as well as Deep Neural Networks for charging behavior analysis and prediction. Recommendations and future research directions are also discussed.

Recently, electric vehicles (EVs) have been introduced as an alternative method of transportation to help mitigate environmental issues, such as carbon emissions and fuel consumption, caused by conventional transportation systems. The implementation of effective EV charging systems is essential to motivate mass adoption of EVs. Accordingly, fast and reliable communications between the charging systems and the EVs are vital for efficient management of the charging process. Different radio access technologies (RATs) are discussed in the literature to enable communication between the highly mobile EVs and the charging subsystems, to collect and exchange information such as state of charge (SoC), users’ locations, and charging decisions between the different network entities. This information can be used to coordinate charging plans and select the optimal routes for moving vehicles. This paper presents a survey of existing literature on vehicular communications for EV charging coordination and management. The communication requirements and feasible communication technologies for vehicular communication are first discussed in details. A review of the physical layer security strategies is then presented and the role of the different RATs in EV charging coordination and management is described and studied.

The utilization of dynamic wireless charging (DWC) systems to charge on-the-move EVs is currently gaining an increasing popularity, as it addresses range and charging downtime issues of EV users. To ensure optimal utilization of this charging infrastructure, coordination of EV charging demand is essential to achieve grid load balancing and prevent grid overload. In contrast to offline, day-ahead charging scheduling, this work proposes an online, mobility-aware, spatial EV allocation algorithm within a DWC coordination strategy. This strategy allocates EVs requesting charge to the most optimal DWC lanes within an EV charging network (ECN) in an Internet of EVs (IoEVs). A detailed charging request scenario is presented to highlight the required communication for authentication between the EVs and the charging infrastructure, to achieve the desired coordination. Description of the proposed EV allocation algorithm is then presented and the performance of the algorithm is evaluated using a hypothetical case study of predicted EV traffic trips in the cities of Dubai and Sharjah, UAE. Upon parameter optimization, results of the conducted analysis reveal that the proposed EV allocation algorithm achieves an almost flattened load profile across the DWC lanes that reduces the PAER by more than 44% in comparison with a shortest distance allocation algorithm, for a maximum $2\times $ increase in trip length, and sufficient received energy to compensate for the energy consumed during the trip. This acknowledges grid supply limitations, EV traveling velocities and the maximum service capacity per DWC lane.

The growing penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) and the increasing EV energy demand pose several challenges to the power grid, the power distribution networks and the transportation networks. This growing demand drives the need for effective demand management and energy coordination strategies to maximize the demand covered by the EV charging stations, ensure EV users' satisfaction and prevent grid-side overload. As a result, several optimization problems are formulated and solved in the literature to provide optimal EV charging schedules (i.e. temporal coordination) as well as optimal EV-to-charging-station assignments and routing plans (i.e. spatial coordination). This paper presents a review of the state-of-the-art literature on the utilization of different deterministic optimization techniques to develop optimal EV charging coordination strategies. In particular, these works are reviewed according to their domains of operation (i.e. time-based scheduling, spatial coordination, and spatio-temporal charging coordination), their respective objectives (user-, grid- and operator-related objectives), and the solution algorithms adopted to provide the corresponding optimal coordination plans. This helps in identifying key research gaps and provide recommendations for future research directions to develop comprehensive and computationally efficient charging coordination models.

Dynamic wireless power transfer (DWPT) systems are becoming increasingly important for on-the-move electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions, to overcome range anxiety and compensate for the consumed energy while the EV is in motion. In this work, a DWPT EV charging system is proposed to be implemented on a straight road stretch such that it provides the moving EV with energy at a rate of 308 Wh/km. This rate is expected to compensate for the vehicle’s average energy consumption and allow for additional energy storage in the EV battery. The proposed charging system operates at an average power transfer efficiency that is higher than $90\%$ and provides good lateral misalignment tolerance up to $\pm 200$ mm. Details of the proposed system’s design are presented in this paper, including EV specifications, inductive link and compensation network design and power electronic circuitry.