This program is used to predict the energy usage of a fleet of electric vehicles. The program receives as input GPS traces of each of the vehicles of the fleet. These GPS traces can be obtained, for example, by installing tracking devices onto the vehicles of a fleet for which you want to predict the electrical energy usage. This is especially useful for projects whereby an existing petrol/diesel fleet is to be converted to electric vehicles. The program will analyse the vehicle’s driving and stopping patterns in order to predict the amount of energy used and the amount of time that the vehicle can be charged during the average day. In addition, the program makes provisions to calculate how much of the energy can be provided for by renewable-energy sources.
Please refer to the accompanying open-access journal article publication: Ray of hope for sub-Saharan Africa’s paratransit: Solar charging of urban electric minibus taxis in South Africa. The article shows how this program can be used to derive meaningful results.
If you learn better with videos, here is a video tutorial of the software:
To install EV-Fleet-Sim, all you have to do is:
Install the dependencies listed in the Installation page.
Run pip install ev-fleet-sim in a terminal.
To run the software, you simply enter ev-fleet-sim in a terminal. You can type ev-fleet-sim --help to get further usage instructions.
When you run the software, you are presented with a menu which allows you to select which step of the simulation you would like to run. These steps are meant to be run sequentially.
The simulation workflow is described in the Usage page.
If you would like to contribute changes to the software, or even to this documentation, please see the instructions in the Contributing page.
Welcome to our EV-Fleet-Sim community! You can join our community’s group chat: https://matrix.to/#/#ev-fleet-sim:matrix.org.
If you have encountered any issues/bugs with the software, you can report them in our issues tracker.
For private communcation, you can reach me on my e-mail address:
chris <abraham-without-the-A's> [at] gmail [dot] com or via Matrix:
https://matrix.to/#/@abrac:matrix.org.
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