Monitored Charging

Commercial charging networks in the real world constantly have to react and adapt to problems in the physical world. These may be caused by faulty communications links, unexpected driver behavior, hardware faults, and firmware bugs.

Based on our experience running and managing real-world commercial networks, we have built session monitoring intelligence to improve the quality of charging services delivered by your network.

eDRV's network monitors ongoing sessions so your application can take intelligent actions based on Webhook events.

Setting Session Targets

Start sessions in a fire-and-forget mode. eDRV's session intelligence starts/stops the session based on pre-configured session targets.

The available target types are:

  • Energy : Charge a vehicle with a certain amount of energy.
  • Time : Charge a vehicle for a certain amount of time.
  • SoC : Charge a vehicle to a target State of Charge (if reported by the charging station).
  • Money : For pre-paid charging implementations where Drivers pay a certain amount for energy before charging starts.
  • energy_start_time / energy_stop_time : Start/Stop the energy flow to a vehicle at pre-programmed times of the day.

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Session Targets

See Charging with Session Targets

Session Start Failure

There are many reasons why a chargestation unexpectedly does not start the flow of energy. These reasons range from the driver failing to plug in their EV to poor data connectivity at the chargestation.

If a session fails to start eDRV sends a session.start_failure Webhook event.

Session Stop Failure

Similar to the case above, sometimes a chargestation may miss a stop session message completely giving the impression that a driver is still charging when they may have driven off hours ago. This may lead to unexpected charges for the driver if this is not acted upon by the network as soon as possible.

If a session fails to stop eDRV sends a session.stop_failure Webhook event.

Energy and Idle Period Measurement

The EV may suspend and re-start energy consumption multiple times from from the chargestation. For e.g. when an EV is plugged in and idling.

eDRV metrics keeps a track of Energy and Idle period within a session so you don't have to. See session.metrics in Sessions

If you are using an hourly rate, eDRV uses Energy vs. Idle time monitoring to calculate accurate costs for you. See session.cost in Sessions

Cost Estimation

eDRV calculates the running cost of a session based on the Rate so you don't have to.

For e.g. if you have a Rate Schedule with

  • Time Of Day Rates (e.g $0.25/kWh from 6Am-6Pm, $0.45/kWh from 6:01Pm:5:59Am) and
  • Overstay Rate (e.g. $5/hour after charging completion)

eDRV's charging intelligence takes a whole host of network inputs such as (charging vs. idle time) to update cost for a session in real time so you don't have to. See session.cost in Sessions