Electric vehicle charging assistive system using internet of electric vehicles

The age of conventional vehicles based on fossil fuel is nearing an end, clearly due to their associated environmental issues and the best solution at present for substituting these conventional vehicles is none other than electric vehicles. Hence, electric vehicles are the future in terms of transportation and one of the most critical constraint for its deployment in a large scale is indeed its charging process with the available number of charging stations. This constraint can be solved to a certain extent if the user can be provided with information regarding charging stations nearby. Also, the availability of internet has improved a lot and is still developing, thus within a few years it is almost certain that reliable internet connectivity will be available almost everywhere making the deployment of Internet of Things and its related applications simpler and more practical. Our intention here is to provide a solution to the above constraint by introducing a system based on the concept of Internet of Things, which consist of an add on device for electric vehicles, a server, priority estimator for charging stations, all of which are interconnected through the internet and hence forming the internet of electric vehicles. The add on device takes inputs from OBD (On Board Diagnostics) port which is interfaced with CAN bus of the electric vehicle and a GPS module, the inputs acquired are pushed to a server using Wi-Fi internet connectivity available in the vehicles. The server then forwards the data received to all charging stations within a specified distance. The charging stations estimate the priority list and sends the list back to the server. The server on receiving the priority list from a charging station processes the list and sends information like priority of the electric vehicle, charging station ID and its location to each electric vehicle. The add-on device then displays the received information to the user when required so that the user could decide the optimum charging station to charge his/her electric vehicle. Thus, the system enables efficient and optimum utilization of charging stations by assisting the user to decide where to charge his/her electric vehicle.