dockChain: A Solution for Electric Vehicles Charge Point Anxiety
For EV drivers and charging infrastructure providers, this work addresses a practical bottleneck in EV adoption by enabling more efficient use of existing charge points without infrastructural changes.
The paper introduces dockChain, a charge point adapter that allows multiple EVs to share a single charge point by chaining adapters together, aiming to reduce Charge Point Anxiety. It presents the hardware design, charging policies, and a distributed algorithm for chain length detection.
This paper addresses Charge Point Anxiety surrounding electric vehicles (EVs), an issue preventing the mass adoption of this greener mode of transport. We discuss the design and implementation of a charge point adapter called \textit{dockChain} that will help mitigate Charge Point Anxiety. The key feature of the dockChain is that it allows multiple EVs to connect simultaneously to a single charge by connecting the adapters together in a chain resulting in additional charging opportunities - without the need for infrastructural changes. We describe the operation of the network of adapters, the hardware components and charging policies for the adapter. A distributed algorithm that can detect the length of the chain in a dockChain network is also presented.