Automated Park and Charge: Concept and Energy Demand Calculation

Abstract

In this paper, we present the concept of automated park and charge functions in two different use cases. The main use case is automated driving in production and the other use case is within automated valet parking in parking garages. The automated park and charge in production is developed in the scope of the publicly funded project E-SELF in Germany. The central aim of this project is the development and integration of automated driving at the end-of-line in the production at Ford Motor Company's manufacturing plant in Cologne. The driving function thereby is mostly based upon automated valet driving with an infrastructure-based perception and motion planning. Especially for electric vehicles, the state of charge of the battery is critical, since energy is needed for all testing and driving operations at the end-of-line. In addition, long shipping, combined with a specific state of charge requirement at customer delivery, require recharging at the production facility. This recharging process is also an automated process with a robot and demands direct connection to the driving function. The main scope of this paper is the introduction of an energy demand calculation for the necessary charging operations. The developed tool allows multiple analyses for identifying further potentials in the production line. Based on a study of a Ford Mach-E it showed, that the highest energy demands are due to battery self-discharging during standstill, especially in the summer months. For a transport to the customer by train and truck, an energy demand of 2kWh within the production facility is estimated. Longer transport times, e.g. when the vehicle is shipped to the customer, the energy demand increases up to 4 kWh. Depending on the vehicle and application, the developed toolchain allows future optimization of recharging processes and also promotes automated park and charging, where the demands can be individually calculated by the park management system.