Model Software Selection

In order to complete the objectives, the project only required 1 modelling software for each of the scenarios before being able to calculate their charging demand profiles. The new demand profiles would then be presented on excel to analyse the supply/demand. The software’s capabilities were vital in order to complete our project aims.

EV Charging Demand Model

The team obtained the model from our academic supervisor, Dr Nick Kelly, and was developed by the Energy Systems Research Unit (ESRU) at Strathclyde University on Visual Basic for Applications. There are a lot of advantages to using Visual Basic instead of one of the other coding programmes, such as:

• The structure of the Basic programming language is very simple, particularly as to the executable code.

• Visual basic is not only a language but primarily an integrated, interactive development environment (IDE).

• It has been highly optimized to support rapid application development (RAD). It is particularly easy to develop graphical user interfaces and to connect them to handler functions provided by the application.

• The graphical user interface provides intuitively appealing views for the management of the program structure in the large and various types of entities (classes, modules, procedures, forms, etc…)

Supply and Demand

All the information for National grid, Carbon content, Car park behavior profile, and EV charging information were available in form of statistical data. For these data processing, Microsoft Excel was used, as it is the most widely available software for this purpose [1] [2]. Some of the features that Excel has for this task are:

• Data Organization: The ability to organize large amounts of data into orderly, logical spread sheets and charts. This allows the user to analyse and digest all the information presented to them more easily and allows the users to communicate the information in an effective and efficient way.

• Formula and Calculation Features: Excel is able to perform numerous calculations very quickly, making things a lot easier than working them out by yourself with a calculator. Depending on the users understanding of excel, one can use this program to compute both simple and complex equations and formulas using large amounts of data.

•  Third-Party Support: Excel is considered to be the universal standard for spreadsheet software and because of this excel can be used on a number of different platforms such as smartphones and tablets. Most other spreadsheet programs also support importing Excel sheets into their own formats and exporting their own spreadsheets as excel files.

• Office Integration: As Excel is part of the Microsoft group, it works well with all other piece of software in Office. The spreadsheets and graphs produced on excel can be easily added to word documents as well as PowerPoint presentations to create more visually dynamic reports and presentations.