Application Software for Studying the Impact of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations in Distribution Systems

The road transportation sector is facing a transition from fossil fuels to electricity that is producing many technical impacts in local distribution systems because of the widespread installation of home and public Electric Vehicle (EV) chargers with power outputs that range from few to hundreds of kW. To ease the distribution system impact analysis of these rapidly growing loads, this paper describes a software application developed in Matlab that integrates the attributes of Eclipse SUMO and OpenDSS to co-simulate a road transportation network and a distribution system, obtain realistic usage schedules of EV chargers, and quantify their effects on voltages and currents of medium- and low-voltage feeders. A case study presenting the distribution system impact analysis of six public EV charging stations in Barranquilla, Colombia is reported to illustrate the features of the developed tool. The results demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed application software to simulate practical charging impact scenarios with different transportation networks, charger locations, and power levels.