A Comparative Analysis of Early Departure Buttons in Coordinated Control of EV Charging

The increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) necessitates the efficient management of large EV parking facilities to prevent them from exceeding grid capacity and to improve the overall user experience. This paper introduces a data-driven approach for coordinated control of EV charging in an office parking facility, integrating Early Departure Buttons (EDB) into the system. These buttons provide a binary option for users to indicate an earlier departure than a predefined time. We employ the EDB data to improve departure time estimations and to address issues where EVs receive no or only very low energy. We utilize three datasets originating from different geographical locations. One dataset displays a user pattern where users leave shortly after completing their charging, unlike the other datasets which follow typical working hours. Our simulations show that the unique user pattern significantly increases fairness among users, and integrating EDBs improves fairness for the other datasets to levels similar to those of quick station turnover.