“This article will introduce how the Jena public transportation system in Germany monitors the charging piles of its electric bus fleet and uses advanced diagnostic functions to increase its availability and optimize maintenance activities.
“
The charging facility is always in view.
Image credit: © Stadtwerke Jena / Anna Schroll
This article will introduce how the Jena public transportation system in Germany monitors the charging piles of its electric bus fleet and uses advanced diagnostic functions to increase its availability and optimize maintenance activities.
In Jena, Germany, electric vehicles appear in the form of trams and have been in use for 120 years. With the advent of diesel-powered bus fleets, the city has gradually formed an efficient public transportation system. Last year, electric vehicles were incorporated into the city’s public transportation operations. The first three electric vehicles put into operation have begun regular service in 2020, aiming to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (approximately 53,000 kilograms per electric bus per year) and particulate matter in urban areas. Emissions and noise pollution.
Public transportation essentially improves and maintains its long-term operation through smooth and punctual operation. In this case, the operation of trams particularly requires reliable and uninterrupted power supply, which is the responsibility of the city’s public transport operator Jenaer Nahverkehr’s power supply department. Nevertheless, in rare cases, system technical failures may still occur. In order to minimize the impact of failures on the operation process and passengers, it is necessary to reduce downtime. This requires a reliable control and remote control system to support, and this system can be implemented through PcVue SCADA software.
For many years, the Frankfurt Automation Business Unit of Actemium of Germany has been a partner of the Jena public transportation system, responsible for the implementation and further development of power supply control and remote control technology, and monitoring of signal and safety systems.
The power supply department is responsible for maintaining the newly introduced charging facilities for electric buses. They hope to integrate the charger into the control system, so Frankfurt Actemium Automation is entrusted to perform this operation.
The main goal of this expansion is to remotely monitor the charging facilities through the power supply department in order to detect and avoid failures as early as possible. At the same time, it is necessary to minimize the travel time of service personnel, especially in the same city, mainly because the city is located in the Saale Valley and a few routes have high traffic density.
The existing control system has formed a set of standards, which can process data through various industrial communication protocols and remote alarms to realize visualization, archiving and data exchange with external systems.
OCPP-driver to communicate with charging station
Charging station monitoring generally adopts the open standard protocol OCPP (Open Charging Point Protocol) to ensure interoperability between products of different manufacturers.
With the latest PcVue version, the manufacturer ARC Informatique can provide a communication driver for the OCPP protocol, which can support the existing 1.6-J and 2.0.1 protocol versions and 1 and 2 security profiles. The software also overcomes the typical OCPP problem, that is, a charging station can only communicate with one charging station management system (CSMS). Using the proxy function, the charger’s OCPP information can be passed to a third-party system. This shows that the typical feature of the open PcVue system is that it has a wide range of data exchange options.
Integrated operation function
The newly-added user interface entry can be seamlessly integrated with the existing system. It displays the charging stations distributed throughout the city as symbol marks in the form of a map. For users who have been familiar with the existing functions and operating concepts of the control system for many years, the learning curve of the new visualization function is very short, which is also reflected in the charging station monitoring area.
Data analysis and monitoring
The core function implemented by Actemium is alarm and log data management, which allows accurate failure analysis in real-time operation and historical data evaluation. Its alarm system is convenient for personnel on duty to diagnose faults in advance through the secure remote access system of public utilities, and then make adjustments or take appropriate measures.
In addition, because the traffic control center is connected to the charging infrastructure, its dispatcher workstation can Display the location of the bus at the corresponding charging point in real time and point out the faults that affect the operation. This means that adjustments can be made quickly in the vehicle deployment plan to avoid cancellation or delays in the route. After the incident, the maintenance personnel can also determine the true cause.
Image source: © Jenaer Nahverkehr GmbH
Alarms with a particularly high priority will be sent to mobile terminals on standby in the form of telematics.
Users of the system can display and monitor the ongoing charging process through trend data, so that they can intuitively compare all measured values, such as current, voltage, and power values. Similarly, it can call the completed charging process from the transaction history for review and comparison; it can also identify the corresponding vehicle and record its current charging status.
Users can export transaction history by pressing a button, or automatically export and store as weekly and monthly reports. Special attention should be paid to the energy consumption of each vehicle and the charging process, as well as the number of wrong transactions.
The user interface of the system further realizes the following functions:
– Charging station access management system
– Lock or unlock the charging station for use
– Remotely activate or cancel the charging process
– Store and retrieve specific files of the charging station
It only took a few weeks to prove its actual benefits
Christian Zeh, a test and maintenance engineer for the public transport system in Jena, Germany, is confident in the solution.
“After integrating the Electronic charging station, you can see all the operating status in the monitoring system, which provides us with immediate intervention options. Therefore, the charging facility is fully integrated into the operation workflow of the power supply department. The practicality of the system is It has been proven in just a few weeks of daily operation, especially in controlling temperature fluctuations in charging stations.”
With the implementation of charging facilities in the control and remote control system, the power supply team is ready for the planned expansion of the electric bus fleet and the related expansion of charging facilities.
0 Comments for “Know the fault in advance!How to monitor the charging station of electric bus fleet with advanced multifunctional software”