Quality of service measurement for electric vehicle fast charging stations: a new evaluation model under uncertainties

Abstract

This study addresses the quality of service (QoS) evaluation problem for electric vehicle (EV) fast charging stations (FCSs). With the increasing market penetration of EVs, effective service quality evaluation under different charging scenarios is a pressing and open issue for planning FCSs to accommodate non-stationary customer charging demand. Unlike previous studies, we make the first attempt to define the connotation of QoS from the EV customers' standpoint based on an extended universal generating function (EUGF). First, we formulate the charging behaviour as a fuzzy queuing process, where the arrival rate and service rate are modelled as fuzzy numbers. Second, the QoS requirement level is taken into account to better reflect the real charging environment. The model is then extended to incorporate the charging station structure by introducing the concept of the composition operator. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to examine the performance of the EUGF-based model. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to obtain a realistic and precise QoS evaluation, and can serve as an effective indicator for FCS planning and operation problems.