SimBEV usage

This section gives a quick overview, what you can do with SimBEV and how to use it.

General Concept

SimBEV forecasts charging demand for electric vehicles in a given time period. It does so on the basis of german mobility data. This data is split into different region types (urban, suburban, rural).

The system is parameterized with the help of different input parameters such as battery capacity and charging power (slow and fast) as well as the consumption of each car.

  • It reads the data and creates SimBEV object(s) (depends on the specified iterations).

  • Every SimBEV object gets setup.

  • For every region a new process is created and it iterates through all vehicles and generate their events and outputs.

Example run

To determine the charging demand for a single defined region, you first need to collect the relevant data:

  • Region type of the region

  • Vehicle types and their amount for the relevant year

  • Vehicle tech data (if unsure, use the default values)

For your first scenario, you can simply copy the directory “default” in the scenarios folder, rename the copy to your scenario name, and then change the relevant files (regions.csv, tech_data.csv). In this example, we will name it “test”.

After you have collected the necessary data and input it into the scenario files, we can look at the config settings next. Open the “minimal.cfg” and set the start and end dates (ISO-format). If you have many vehicles in your region, you might also want to increase the scaling (section sim_params at the bottom of the config). If you have multiple regions set in your regions.csv (either due to different region types or to split your regions for multiprocessing), you can also adjust the parameter num_threads. Now you can run your simulation with the following command:

python -m simbev scenarios/test/configs/minimal.cfg

You can check the simulation results in your scenario directory under “results”.

For more in-depth settings, check out the section Simulation Settings and the “default.cfg”.

Usage overview

With SimBEV, you can:

  1. Create driving profiles for electric cars including:

    • times of driving, parking and charging

    • distance of driving

    • current location of the car

    • charging information - power, energy, time, type of charging station

    • battery state of the car for each timestep

  2. Aggregated energy time series of charging events

  3. Allocation of charging events and stations in combination with TracBEV

  4. Application of different charging strategies with SpiceEV

Get the data

If you want to run SimBEV in the mode using probabilities, a data set is available here.

If you have access to the MiD 2017 data set and want to create your own driving profiles, you can use the script examples/driving_profiles_from_mid. At the bottom of the file you can set the number of driving profiles and the regions and car types.

Create a scenario

  • You can use a default scenario or define a custom one in the directory scenarios

  • Run SimBEV with the desired scenario:

python -m simbev path/to/config

defaults to:

python -m simbev scenarios/default/configs/default.cfg

  • Results are created in the subdirectory results in the scenario directory

Set parameters for your scenario

Select regio-type for the mobility characteristics:

Rural regions:

  • Small town, village - LR_Klein

  • Medium-sized cities, urban areas - LR_Mitte

  • Central cities - LR_Zentr

Urban regions:

  • Small town, urban areas - SR_Klein

  • Medium-sized cities, urban areas - SR_Mitte

  • Large cities - SR_Gross

  • Metropolis - SR_Metro

Change vehicle configuration

  • battery capacity

  • charging power (slow and fast)

  • consumption

Decide how many vehicles should be simulated.

Iterations

The default value of simulation iterations is 1. By using the argument -r or --repeat a certain number of simulations can be specified:

python -m simbev -r <number of iterations>

or

python -m simbev --repeat <number of iterations>