Analysis of Electrical Vehicle behavior from real

world data: a V2I Architecture

Luca Bascetta, Giambattista Gruosso, Giancarlo Storti Gajani

Politecnico di Milano
Dipartimento di Elettronica Informazione e Bioingegneria
P.zza Leonardo da Vinci, 32 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
giancarlo.stortigajani@polimi.it

Abstract—The impact of electrical vehicles on distribution

networks is an important aspect for the evaluation of the
potentiality of power grids, above all in the current scenario,
where a significant increase of the number of circulating electrical
vehicles is expected. At the same time it is important to analyze
the vehicles performance and forecast battery fault and aging.
The key point is to have a set of heterogeneous data gathered
over a long time period and collected in an homogeneous way.
Aim of this paper is to present an architecture for Vehicle to
Infrastructure (V2I) communication able to collect data from the
vehicle but also from the driver and other sensors. The data
collected are integrated inside a database and used for future
analysis, according to the activities developed in the TEINVEIN
project (“TEcnologie INnovative per i VEicoli Intelligenti”, In-
novative Technologies for Smart Vehicles).
Keywords—V2I, electrical vehicle monitoring, Battery, IoT,
Drive Cycles

I. I NTRODUCTION
Nowadays the spread of full electrical vehicles (FEVs) is
increasing, introducing new challenges and new questions for
the future of mobility. For sure it will change the way vehicles
are used, due to constraints given by battery state of charge
and state of health that will, in some cases, influence the
“anxiety” of the driver in reaching the desired destination and
thus his/her driving behavior. But, possibly, more important
issues are at stake, for example the utilities could be interested
in forecasting EV penetration to estimate the potential increase
on electricity demand in a given area for planning purposes.
Diffusion of FEVs will also have an impact on the electrical
energy distribution system, especially from the point of view
of energy demand passing through the development of new an-
cillary services [1]–[6], the time-space charging requirements
[6]–[9], the state of health of the battery [10], [11] and other
issues.
Data available today are limited, and there are very few
studies that can analyze and identify useful indicators. The
first point is then to measure what happens inside the EV and
correlate this information to other information, not directly
related to the vehicles [1], [12], [13].
But a vehicle provided with sensors is also able to become an
instrument to track driver behaviors and to sense what happens
outside the vehicle during the driving cycle, that is the reason
why we propose a new architecture for acquiring data from
the vehicle, but also other sensors, useful to perform other
analysis.
Fig. 1. V2I architecture: the main idea is to collect and make homogeneous
data from the vehicle and send them to a Database for further analysis
The aim of this paper is, therefore, to formalize the
reference architecture for developing an in-vehicle datalogger
able to collect data from the EV components, but also from ad-
Hoc developed I/O measurement boards and from positioning
systems. The activity represent one of the major output of
project TEINVEIN (“TEcnologie INnovative per i VEicoli
Intelligenti”, Innovative Technologies for Smart Vehicles).
The idea is to have a set of coherent informations collected
into a cloud-based database able to interact with Matlab for
further analysis.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II we in-
troduce the Hardware architecture followed by the description
of the Software architecture in Section III. Some results will
be presented and discussed in Section IV, followed by the
conclusions.
II. H ARDWARE ARCHITECTURE
The proposed monitoring system can be connected to the
in-vehicle CANbus network, acquiring data from the Elec-
tronic Control Units (ECU), especially the Vehicle Manage-
ment System (VMS) ECU and the Battery management System
(BMS) ECU as shown in Fig. 1.
The different data available from these ECUs are, for example,
those reported in the upper part of table I. Since all these
information are not sufficient for the purpose of our analysis,
additional components are added to the architecture.
A first device is an I/O acquisition node capable to read
and send messages over the CANbus network, another device
is an Inertial Management Unit (IMU) used to acquire vehicle
accelerations, angular rates and velocities with respect to the
center of gravity. A last component is a GPS system for the
global positioning of the vehicle and for the trajectory analysis.
The variables monitored from these subsystems are reported
in the second part of table I.
A Gateway-Logger block is also included, its functional
blocks are reported in fig 2. The green part represents the
embedded system based on ST Technology, while the orange
represents the external blocks of the CANbus node (also based
on ST technology) and of the GPS, an off the shelf component.
Purpose of this block is, obviously, logging all acquired data
on local memory and, at the same time, forwarding this data
through the data gateway to the Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I)
module and from there to external cloud storage systems. The
local memory is used essentially as a buffer when external
communication is not available. Fig. 2. Hardware architecture of the logger where it is possible to see the three
main sub-components: the V2I Module, the Embedded logger that includes
The communication between the developed data gateway IMU and other sensors, the Vehicle DataBus and positioning module
and the V2I module is mainly serial, but other systems can be
tested. Two different V2I protocols have been chosen in order
to evaluate their performance. The first one is wifi 802.11/p,
typical of vehicular networks, the second is the LORA wireless
protocol. This component has been designed as an external
module, because the idea is to easily replace it in order to test
several different communication protocols. In this paper we
report only the case of Wifi connection.
TABLE I. DATA AVAILABLE FROM V EHICLE AND FROM DATALOGGER
Variable name Variable description Units
Vs vehicle speed Km/h
Vbatt battery voltage V
Ibatt battery current A
◦
Tbatt battery temperature C
SOC state of charge %
a x , a y , az x, y, z, accelerations m/s2
ωx , ωy , ωz angular rates rad/s2 Fig. 3. Software architecture for data collection
P OS global position DM S
Bpos brake position %
Tpos throttle position %
CS cooler status ON/OF F provides a set of API that can be used both in Json or Xml in
Pp passenger presence Y ES/N O
order to publish and gather information from the DataGateway.
The data organization inside Thingspeak is based on channels
III. S OFTWARE ARCHITECTURE and each channel can be acquired separately. The database can
be accessed by Matlab in order to perform analysis, filtering
The amount of information collected by the system is large and associations of the data. The first task of the database is
in terms of variables, but also in terms of temporal samples; to store the EV fleet status, mostly derived from the on-board
for this reason it is essential to design a database tailored to GPS system, combined with the EV telemetry, a query on this
their management and processing. This database must be easily dataset allows to obtain data for a specific EV relative to the
expanded since it is also the basis for the implementation of state of the battery and of the vehicle at each sampling instant.
new services.
The data collection system chosen is ThingSpeak [14] by
Mathworks, as it allows easy integration in Matlab for off- IV. R ESULTS
line data analysis.
The reference architecture is shown in Fig. 3, where the data For the extent of this paper, we consider a fleet of 10 elec-
from different sources are collected by the Data Gateway and tric vehicles with the same characteristics for an observation
stored on a local SD Card, allowing data collection also when time of 6 months. The electric vehicles are the Zhidou ZD2
the systems is not connected to a WiFi network. ThingSpeak [15] owned by Sharengo [16], an Italian car sharing operator.
 TABLE II. ZD EV CHARACTERISTICS
Distribution of Trips Energy consumption
Motor PMSM 160
Front wheel driven
140
Power: 9KW
Power Pack LiFePO4 72V/150AH 120
Charging time 8h

Number of trips
100
Comunication CAN
Air Conditioner Heat/Cold Yes 80

60

40
Distribution of Trips durations
160
20

140
0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
120 Average Energy Consumption [kWh]
Number of trips

100

80
Fig. 5. Vehicle trip average energy consumption
60

40

20 Average speed of each Trip

150

0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Time of Trip [min]

100
Fig. 4. Vehicle trip duration: there are two peaks, as expected one is related

Number of Trips
to durations less than 10 minutes and the other is to durations of about 12
minutes.
50

These EVs are small cars (the size is 2765 × 1540 × 1545mm
0
with a wheelbase of 1765mm, a total weight, battery excluded, 0 5 10 15 20 25
Average Speed [km/h]
30 35 40 45 50

of 480kg plus about 200kg for the battery) characterized by a

12kWh lithium iron phosphate (LiFePo4) battery composed by Fig. 6. Vehicle trip speed: the mean value is around 15 km/h, usual for city
20 cells with a maximum voltage of 72 V at full charge. The traffic conditions
car maximum speed is about 80km/h, the range about 140km.
All EVs have heating and air conditioning, that constitute an
additional important load on the battery. The main electrical average distances travelled
180
characteristics of the vehicle are reported in table II.
160

140

One of the first analysis that can be done, starting from 120
Number of Trips

the data collected, is to find the average duration of the paths. 100

It should not be forgotten that data refer to a fleet used for 80

car-sharing activities, so it is expected that the most frequent 60

durations are relatively short ones as shown in Fig 4. 40

A further analysis is given to evaluate the average amount 20

of energy consumed during the trip. This energy is below 1 0

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
kWh, and rarely exceeds 3kWh (Fig. 5). This is also due to Average Distance [km]

the low working speed (Fig. 6) and mean distance traveled

Fig. 7. Vehicle trip distance: the mean value is around 3 km usual for city
(Fig. 7). All these information together allow to define a set of short trips
performance indicators very useful for the definition of vehicle
range and yield. This is particularly true if these informations
are complemented by additional data, such as the ones obtained
from the accelerometers that can help improve the knowledge Vehicle Tracking

of driver habits, and its relation to efficiency.

The architecture proposed in this paper can be used as

crowd sensing as well, by collecting information about electric
vehicle charging habits, and, consequently, provide data that
can be used to perform recharge impact analysis on energy
distribution networks.
An information that can be obtained even using our relatively
small current sample is the refill duration distribution (Fig. 9).
The sample shows how the average duration is in the order
of 6 hours, which is consistent with the hypothesis of charges Fig. 8. Vehicle Tracking: each color represent a single trip. For sake of
made starting from values of about 20%SOC and with a mean clarity only a few of them are reported
value of Energy employed around 9 kWh (Fig. 10).

90
80
70
Number of Charging events
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1 2
Fig. 9. Distribution of Charging duration
120
100
Number of Charge Events
80
60
40
20
0
0 5
Fig. 10. Distribution of Average Energy for charging the vehicle
In this paper a hardware and software architecture for the
collection of data from electric vehicles has been presented.
The innovative part is the integration of different sources,
such as vehicle data, sensors to monitor vehicle status and
positioning systems. This allows to have a set of data that can
be fused together in order to obtain information suitable for the
understanding of the uses and habits of electric vehicles and
their users on a large scale. In this paper in the results section a
few examples of analysis obtained with the proposed method-
ology have been shown. Future works concern the integration
of data from inertial units and correlation of information, their
classification in driving styles and overall efficiency analyses.
Published in the context of the project TEINVEIN: TEc-
nologie INnovative per i VEicoli Intelligenti, CUP (Codice
Unico Progetto - Unique Project Code): E96D17000110009
- Call “Accordi per la Ricerca e lInnovazione”, cofunded
by POR FESR 2014-2020 (Programma Operativo Regionale,
Fondo Europeo di Sviluppo Regionale Regional Operational
Programme, European Regional Development Fund).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
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