Researchers have advanced their understanding of how wireless charging on roads could affect driver behaviour

The team at KAUST, Saudi Arabia, have advanced their understanding of how wireless charging on roads could affect driver behaviour, in a future governed by electric vehicles. The team achieved this by implementing statistical geometry to the study of urban road networks.

During their travels, drivers could attempt wireless road charging,
which has repercussions for traffic control and urban planning. The size of batteries deployed by manufacturers into electronic cars may also be affected by the density of wireless road charging facilities in a city and the likely time spent by commuters on and between charging roads.

Postdoc Mustafa Kishk stated: “Our work is motivated by the global trend of moving towards green transportation and EVs. Efficient dynamic charging systems, such as wireless power transfer systems installed under roads, are being developed by researchers and technology companies around the world as a way to charge EVs while driving without the need to stop. In this context, there is a need to mathematically analyse the large scale deployment of charging roads in metropolitan cities. Our main challenge is that the metrics used to evaluate the performance of dynamic charging deployment, such as the distance to the nearest charging road on a random trip, depend on the starting and ending points of each trip. To correctly capture those metrics, we had to explicitly list all possible situations, compute the metrics in each case and evaluate how likely it is for each situation to happen in reality. For this, we used an approach called stochastic geometry to model and analyse how these metrics are affected by factors such as the density of roads and the frequency of dynamic charging deployment This is the first study to incorporate stochastic geometry into the performance analysis of charging road deployment in metropolitan cities. It is an important step towards a better understanding of charging road deployment in metropolitan cities.”