13 Oct 2021

Guest blog: Optimising electric vehicle charging stations using Geospatial AI

Case study by Mind Foundry

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Challenge

Transport accounts for around one-fifth of emissions around the world, which equates to 7.9 billion tonnes of CO2 each year. Because of this, many countries are trying to combat climate change by turning to electric vehicles (EV).

In 2019, the UK became one of the first major economies to pass a net zero emissions law, meaning that by 2050 the UK will need to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.

In a bid to support these ambitious targets, Mind Foundry is working alongside Oxfordshire County Council, and others utilising AI to optimise infrastructure budgets, ensure ethical considerations for local communities and distribute power more efficiently.

Oxfordshire’s councils have an opportunity to encourage uptake of EVs by working together to enable the development of a high quality EV charging network. Deciding on the optimal location for building and maintaining additional charging points is a challenging task, but one that is critical to ensure smooth adoption of EVs.

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Solution

The Mind Foundry Platform combines geospatial modelling with a variety of different data sources, to intelligently model and predict the changing requirements for EV charging infrastructure. This provides key optimisations for planners, charge point operators and energy providers, enabling disparate departments to communicate with each other, and collaborate with AI at a more fundamental level.

Given the wide range of data, our customers are able to visualise and analyse insights to uncover issues, within a specific geographical area. The workflows are powered by scalable probabilistic machine learning and connect to both live and historic data sources, providing sophisticated scenario modelling and rollout planning capabilities.

These forecasts are sensitive, not only to immediate demand, but long term strategy. The platform has natural extensions to monitor and manage the available electricity capacity, enabling smart, data-driven resource optimisation.

The importance of deploying the right type of charging asset in the right location to meet the demands of a rapidly increasing requirement for chargers against the need to minimise disruption cannot be overemphasised. A flexible, easy to use mapping system utilising readily accessible data is a key component of the analysis that needs to take place to make this happen and the solution being developed by Mind Foundry has the potential to make this work easier, simpler and more accurate than anything we’ve used before,” Paul Gambrell, Team Leader - EV Integration, Oxfordshire County Council.

Users have the ability to interrogate and add custom data layers, such as their own KPI’s, local survey results and demand forecasts. By adding additional data sets, the Platform’s algorithms are continuously learning and improving outputs.

Benefits

The Mind Foundry Platform provides an advanced, transparent and data-driven approach to optimising EV charging infrastructure, thus ensuring the placement of charging stations are efficient, accessible and fair for UK citizens.

Users are empowered to interrogate, extract and strategise meaningful data, driving critical business decisions in a responsible and transparent way. They are able to understand the limitations of available data that is at their disposal today, and what is required to make a better decision tomorrow.

Mind Foundry enables our customers to:

  • Optimise infrastructure budgets
  • Ensure ethical considerations for local communities
  • Better manage local and national electricity demand
  • Increase profits from charging stations

To find out how our geospatial capabilities can benefit you, please contact us.

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