A back-end system for an autonomous parking and charging system for electric vehicles

Abstract

Electric vehicles must be easy to use to be accepted by customers and to be successful on the market. One important part of this is the need for comfortable charging and parking. Especially if the charging of a vehicle takes a certain amount of time, a good solution to simplify the life of the customer is necessary. The V-Charge project has the vision to provide a solution by combining autonomous valet parking with emobility, introducing improved parking and charging comfort to increase customer acceptance of electric vehicles. V-Charge proposes a solution for charging autonomous electric vehicles in parking places and efficiently using scarce charging resources. For the management of the overall system and the provided resources, a server back-end and a communication infrastructure are provided. In this paper, we present our design of a central server back-end that handles the assignment of free parking spots to autonomous electric vehicles and implements scheduling concepts for a coordinated charging strategy. A typical scenario of such a concept might be the automatic drop-off and recovery of a car in front of an airport terminal without taking care of parking or charging in person.

Estimation of Vehicular Connectivity in Autonomous Parking Scenarios

“…In contrast to only ensuring a continuous connection, we facilitate the Connectivity Map to make parking decisions that take the vehicles' respective QoS requirements, which can change over time, into account. To this end, the V-Charge Parking Manager [2] utilizes the existing database for schedule and mission planning. For example, after a completed download a vehicle can be moved in order to free high-connectivity parking spots.…”

“…V-Charge improves this situation significantly, allowing the driver to stop the car at a designated drop-off zone in front of the terminal and to directly proceed to the departure gate. Meanwhile, a back-end server, called the V-Charge Parking Manager [2], which is in charge of the efficient parking resource management, provides the vehicle with relevant mission information, such as an assigned charging station or parking spot, a map of the premises, etc., via Vehicle-toInfrastructure (V2I) communications. These data allow the vehicle to autonomously navigate and maneuver to its assigned target destination.…”

Secure smartphone-based registration and key deployment for vehicle-to-cloud communications

“…(a) The CustomerManager [1] provides registration functionality and all necessary service methods (pick-up, dropoff, status checking) via RESTful Web services that are being interfaced by the V-Charge smartphone application. All methods of the interface are protected by the OAuth 2.0 standard [12].…”

“…A V-Charge service, called ParkingManager (PM) [1], is deployed to each parking lot or garage that is using the VCharge system. The PM is responsible for managing parking resources by allowing users to make parking reservations and to provide their vehicles with mission control information, starting with their arrival at the parking lot.…”

“…Since each parking garage has its own PM, there is a central backend service that connects all PMs (via Internet) and allows users to register with the V-Charge system which takes care of authentication. In order to cope with the challenging network conditions of the vehicular domain (e.g., intermittent connectivity) and the V-Charge scenario [1] (e.g., no vehicular Internet access), we facilitate a Disruption-or DelayTolerant Networking (DTN) architecture [2] to establish robust and secure Vehicle-to-Cloud (V2C) communications between the vehicles and the PM. For this purpose, we utilize IBR-DTN 2 [3], a lightweight and modular Bundle Protocol [4] implementation.…”