Recently, electric vehicle (EV) technology has received massive attention worldwide due to its improved performance efficiency and significant contributions to addressing carbon emission problems. In line with that, EVs could play a vital role in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, EVs face some challenges such as battery health degradation, battery management complexities, power electronics integration, and appropriate charging strategies. Therefore, further investigation is essential to select appropriate battery storage and management system, technologies, algorithms, controllers, and optimization schemes. Although numerous studies have been carried out on EV technology, the state-of-the-art technology, progress, limitations, and their impacts on achieving SDGs have not yet been examined. Hence, this review paper comprehensively and critically describes the various technological advancements of EVs, focusing on key aspects such as storage technology, battery management system, power electronics technology, charging strategies, methods, algorithms, and optimizations. Moreover, numerous open issues, challenges, and concerns are discussed to identify the existing research gaps. Furthermore, this paper develops the relationship between EVs benefits and SDGs concerning social, economic, and environmental impacts. The analysis reveals that EVs have a substantial influence on various goals of sustainable development, such as affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, industry, economic growth, and climate actions. Lastly, this review delivers fruitful and effective suggestions for future enhancement of EV technology that would be beneficial to the EV engineers and industrialists to develop efficient battery storage, charging approaches, converters, controllers, and optimizations toward targeting SDGs.

Hourly global solar irradiance (GSR) data are required for sizing, planning, and modeling of solar photovoltaic farms. However, operating and controlling such farms exposed to varying environmental conditions, such as fast passing clouds, necessitates GSR data to be available for very short time intervals. Classical backpropagation neural networks do not perform satisfactorily when predicting parameters within short intervals. This paper proposes a hybrid backpropagation neural networks based on particle swarm optimization. The particle swarm algorithm is used as an optimization algorithm within the backpropagation neural networks to optimize the number of hidden layers and neurons used and its learning rate. The proposed model can be used as a reliable model in predicting changes in the solar irradiance during short time interval in tropical regions such as Malaysia and other regions. Actual global solar irradiance data of 5-s and 1-min intervals, recorded by weather stations, are applied to train and test the proposed algorithm. Moreover, to ensure the adaptability and robustness of the proposed technique, two different cases are evaluated using 1-day and 3-days profiles, for two different time intervals of 1-min and 5-s each. A set of statistical error indices have been introduced to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. From the results obtained, the 3-days profile’s performance evaluation of the BPNN-PSO are 1.7078 of RMSE, 0.7537 of MAE, 0.0292 of MSE, and 31.4348 of MAPE (%), at 5-s time interval, where the obtained results of 1-min interval are 0.6566 of RMSE, 0.2754 of MAE, 0.0043 of MSE, and 1.4732 of MAPE (%). The results revealed that proposed model outperformed the standalone backpropagation neural networks method in predicting global solar irradiance values for extremely short-time intervals. In addition to that, the proposed model exhibited high level of predictability compared to other existing models.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have received widespread attention in the automotive industry as the most promising solution for lowering CO₂ emissions and mitigating worldwide environmental concerns. However, the effectiveness of EVs can be affected due to battery health degradation and performance deterioration with lifespan. Therefore, an advanced and smart battery management technology is essential for accurate state estimation, charge balancing, thermal management, and fault diagnosis in enhancing safety and reliability as well as optimizing an EV’s performance effectively. This paper presents an analytical and technical evaluation of the smart battery management system (BMS) in EVs. The analytical study is based on 110 highly influential articles using the Scopus database from the year 2010 to 2020. The analytical analysis evaluates vital indicators, including current research trends, keyword assessment, publishers, research categorization, country analysis, authorship, and collaboration. The technical assessment examines the key components and functions of BMS technology as well as state-of-the-art methods, algorithms, optimization, and control surgeries used in EVs. Furthermore, various key issues and challenges along with several essential guidelines and suggestions are delivered for future improvement. The analytical analysis can guide future researchers in enhancing the technologies of battery energy storage and management for EV applications toward achieving sustainable development goals.

Several processing methods have been proposed for estimating the real pattern of the temporal location and spatial map of the lightning strikes. However, due to the complexity of lightning signals, providing accurate lightning maps estimation remains a challenging task. This paper presents a cross-correlation wavelet-domain-based particle swarm optimization (CCWD-PSO) technique for an accurate and robust representation of lightning mapping. The CCWD method provides an initial estimate of the lightning map, while the PSO attempts to optimize the trajectory of the lightning map by finding the optimal sliding window of the cross-correlation. The technique was further enhanced through the introduction of a novel lightning event extraction method that enables faster processing of the lightning mapping. The CCWD-PSO method was validated and verified using three narrow bipolar events (NBEs) flashes. The observed results demonstrate that this technique offers high accuracy in representing the real lightning mapping with low estimation errors.