Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Central Components for the V-Charge System

Introduction

The EU FP7 project "V-Charge -- Autonomous Valet Parking and Charging for e-Mobility" is based on the vision that, due to required drastic decrease of CO2 production and energy consumption, mobility will undergo important changes in the years to come. This includes new concepts for an optimal combination of public and individual transportation as well as the introduction of electrical cars that need coordinated recharging. A typical scenario of such a concept might be automatic drop-off and recovery of a car in front of a train station without taking care of parking or re-charging. Such new mobility concepts require among other technologies autonomous driving in designated areas. On the other hand, the overall system can be considered as a distributed system consisting of vehicles, sensors, and central servers which all have to communicate to achieve the set goals.

Task Description

The purpose of this thesis project is to develop the general architecture of the server components and their interactions as well as to design, implement, and evaluate selected specific central server components. The central V-Charge server components are essential for the overall V-Charge project since important information has to be distributed from them to single vehicles, they are in charge of management & control of the overall system, user devices will communicate with them to interact with the V-Charge system, and vehicles will also transmit data to them for later use.

The tasks to be worked on during this thesis include

• Study of related work, e.g., on parking space management using sensor networks, scheduling algorithms for central, scarce resources such as charging stations, and networked robotics in general
• Design of the general architecture of the central system components and an interaction concept
• Design and implementation of components in a generic manner
• Detailed design and implementation of selected components, in particular for the management of parking lots, charging stations, and according scheduling algorithms
• Evaluation of the developed components, especially regarding scalability and timely behavior

Links

• Project: v-charge
• Hinweise zur Durchführung von studentischen Arbeiten am IBR