Improving EV-Charging With Really Smart Meters

To project was born to address the problem of energy consumption in future smart cities, where electric vehicles will be charged up everywhere throughout a city. The main problem we had to tackle was to allow smart meter gateways to collect data directly from EV-charging stations.

We leveraged a dedicated hardware module, running Linux, to communicate directly with consumer EV-charging stations within a wide area network. This required us to implement the OCPP protocol in C++ for the embedded system. The data collected can be forwarded to the smart meter gateway, which is connected to the prototype module. In the case of connectivity to the backend being cut, the solution is still completely autonomous.

Our prototype allows an interface with EV-charging stations, which in the near future of smart cities will require a significant amount of power. This trend demands the appropriate management of power that this system provides.