SPEECh

Scalable Probabilistic Estimates of Electric Vehicle Charging

Primary Contact: Siobhan Powell. Email: siobhan (dot) powell (at) stanford (dot) edu

Publication:

S. Powell, G. V. Cezar, R. Rajagopal, "Scalable Probabilistic Estimates of Electric Vehicle Charging Given Observed Driver Behavior", Applied Energy. Accepted.

Citations for code and data:

Siobhan Powell, Gustavo Vianna Cezar, & Ram Rajagopal. (2021). SiobhanPowell/speech: First release (v1.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5593509

Powell, Siobhan; Cezar, Gustavo Vianna; Rajagopal, Ram (2021), “SPEECh Original Model”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/gvk34mybtb.1

About

Electric vehicles (EV) and EV charging stations are expected to multiply over the next decade. Long-term planning for grid and charging network design depend on detailed forecasts of future charging demand. SPEECh, Scalable Probabilistic Estimates of Electric Vehicle Charging, is a novel, probabilistic framework for simulating very large-scale estimates of EV charging load that are grounded in real charging data and drivers' charging patterns. You can learn more about SPEECh by reading the paper (listed above). For more details about the larger project: https://energy.stanford.edu/bitsandwatts/research/ev50-flagship-project/long-range-planning-ev50-what-future-demand-charging. This project builds on earlier work in the SCRIPT project: https://github.com/slacgismo/SCRIPT-tool.

Project Advisors: Ram Rajagopal, Ines Azevedo, Gustavo Cezar, Liang Min.

Collaborators and Team: Charles Kolstad, Lesley Ryan, Noel Crisostomo, Matt Alexander, Eric Wood, Wahila Wilkie, the GISMo, S3L, and EV50 groups, and many more.

Thank you to the many collaborators who have made this project possible.

This repository contains:

• The model,
• Examples demonstrating how to use the model and adjust assumptions to run new scenarios yourself,
• Code to run an interactive application where you can do this ^ through an interface,
• Code to help you apply the model to your own data set, and
• The code used for the paper.

This README contains a short tutorial and useful instructions on all of the above elements.

Data

Two data sets have been posted in association with this repository. They are available at this link or by request to the authors: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/gvk34mybtb/1.

1. The original model files are in the folder Model Data. You must download these and save them in the following folder structure to be able to run the model: Data > Original16 > [files]. All GMM files (ending in .p) should be kept in a further subfolder: Data > Original16 > GMMs > [files].
2. The profiles used in Figure 4 are in the folder Normalized Load Profiles. They represent a typical weekday or weekend aggregate profile for each of the 16 driver groups. They are in units kW/driver: calculated by simulating the demand for 10000 drivers in each group and then normalizing the result by dividing by 10000. They are not scaled according to group weights. By weighting and combining these profiles you can approximate model results; this offers a simpler way to generate your own scenarios without running the original code.

Interactive Application

To play with the interactive application online, go to: ev50-speech.stanford.edu.

To run the interactive application locally: 0. Make sure you have a working version of Python 3 (this code was tested with Python 3.7.4).

1. Navigate to this folder in your terminal.
2. Download the data folder and save it as described in step 1 of Data above.
3. In a new virtual environment, run pip install -r requirements.txt. You can also run with the packages in your main system, but the requirements.txt file lists versions which we know will work with together in this code.
4. Run flask run.
5. Go to localhost:5000 in your browser.
6. Play with the model and run your own scenarios!

This web application was developed by Lesley Ryan with help from Siobhan Powell. For more information on how it works, please refer to the 'About' page in the application.

Code

The main code is presented in speech.py and the file SimpleExample.py presents a simple example of how to use it. HowToExtractIndividualSessions.py gives sample code for accessing the individual simulated sessions behind an aggregate scenario.

The more complex scenarios used in RunPaperScenarios.py generate the scenarios included in the publication, "Scalable Probabilistic Estimates of Electric Vehicle Charging Given Observed Driver Behavior".

Classes in SPEECh

• DataSetConfigurations stores information about the data set being used, such as the location and the particular segment labels/naming conventions
• SPEECh is the top level class storing the data and configurations. It is very general. It loads P(G) and P(z|G).
• SPEEChGeneralConfiguration manages model configuration details not specific to just one of the data sets, such as the time step. It includes methods to alter the distributions over groups (change_pg()) and behaviours (change_ps_zg()). It stores an instance of SPEEChGroupConfiguration for each driver group.
• SPEEChGroupConfiguration is used for each individual driver group. It calculates the number of sessions that driver group will use in each segment, and stores the GMM session models for that driver group.
• LoadProfile uses the above to calculate the total load profile for a particular group
• Plotting includes plotting functions

Mini Tutorial

Based on the SimpleExample.py file.

First, import classes from speech.py

from speech import DataSetConfigurations
from speech import SPEECh
from speech import SPEEChGeneralConfiguration
from speech import Plotting

Then, input the total number of EV drivers and whether you are modeling a weekday or weekend:

total_evs = 1000
weekday_option = 'weekday'

Create your main model objects. Optionally, use 'NewData' and a custom number of groups, ng, if you are working with another data set.

data = DataSetConfigurations('Original16', ng=16)
model = SPEECh(data)
config = SPEEChGeneralConfiguration(model)

If you want to remove the use of residential timers and focus on uncontrolled charging behaviour, you could instead call:

config = SPEEChGeneralConfiguration(model, remove_timers=True)

At this stage you have the option to adjust the distribution over driver groups, P(G). As an example, this would adjust the weight of clusters 0 and 4 to cover 50% of drivers each. I.e. P(G=0)=0.5, P(G=4)=0.5. This step is optional. The flag dend=True should be used when you make your own weights to ensure the group numbers line up with the paper. Also note the group numbering starts at 0 instead of 1 in the code.

config.change_pg(new_weights={0: 0.5, 4: 0.5}, dend=True)

Next, tell the configuration class how many drivers to simulate, and call groups() to load the group configurations.

config.num_evs(total_evs)
config.groups()

At this stage you have the option to adjust the distribution over charging session behaviours, P(s|z, G). As an example, this would adjust the distribution for driver group 0 workplace weekday charging, giving 40% weight to the first behaviour component in the mixture model and 60% to the second. This step is optional.

config.change_ps_zg(0, 'Work', 'weekday', {0: 0.4, 1: 0.6})

Finally, calculate the load profile and plot:

config.run_all(weekday=weekday_option)
plots = Plotting(model, config)
plots.total(save_str='simple_example_plot_adjusted.png')

The plotting class also offers other methods to explore the model. plots.pg() plots the distribution P(G) as a bar chart. plots.sessions_components() plots the separate elements in the mixture model for a given segment and driver group; in this example, workplace weekday charging for cluster 1. groups() generates a grid of plots showing the load profile for drivers in each individual group. Use these functions to explore the driver groups and behaviours you want to change.

plots.pg()
plots.sessions_components(g=1, cat='Work', weekday='weekday')
plots.groups(save_string='simple_example_groups.png')

For the Paper "Scalable Probabilistic Estimates of Electric Vehicle Charging Given Observed Driver Behavior"

The file RunPaperScenarios.py was used to run the scenarios presented in the paper. The code used to run other calculations, train the model, and run the validation results presented in the paper is shown in the folder ProcessingForPaper.

Running with Custom Data

Code included in the directory FitNewModel will let you fit your own version of the model to your own data. The process for doing this is divided into several steps:

1. Run FitNewModel/process_driver_data.py to process your data to calculate the feature vectors used for clustering the drivers. Make sure to follow the specific comments about data formatting and necessary columns. Edit the top of the file to direct to the folder containing your data. Example file name: sessions2019.csv.
2. Run FitNewModel/select_cluster_number.py to produce an elbow plot of the driver clustering. Edit the top of the file to direct to the folder containing your data. Look for a kink or elbow in the elbow plot that is produced to select your number of clusters; this is an input to the following steps. In the paper this was 16.
3. Run FitNewModel/cluster_drivers.py to cluster the drivers. Before running, edit the top of the file to direct to your data folder and to give your selected number of clusters.
4. Use the FitNewModel/fit_gmms.ipynb to: 1) generate and save gaussian mixture models (GMMs) for all the driver clusters and charging segments; and 2) go through these results one by one, looking at an elbow plot of AIC, and select the optimal number of mixture components for each. These will be copied over to the final GMM folder.
5. Run FitNewModel/postprocessing.py to post-process the data, putting the results of the clustering into the P(G) and P(z|G) language needed by the main model. This file also has a sample method to include in the DataSetConfigurations class in speech.py where your new data set will be called NewData. You can edit this here and copy over the changes.
6. Use SimpleExample.py to explore your resulting model, making sure to input the right number of driver groups, ng, and data set name, NewData, when you call the DataSetConfigurations class.

Requirements and Set-up

This works with:

    pandas == 0.25.1
    matplotlib == 3.1.1
    numpy == 1.21.6
    sklearn == 0.22.2.post1
    flask == 1.1.1
    json == 2.0.9

Python 3.7.4. Note, the paper was run with numpy == 1.18.1, but since security issues have now been identified with numpy <= 1.18.5 we are updating the requirements here.

Funding Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Bits & Watts Initiative, by the California Energy Commission under grant EPC-16-057, and by the National Science Foundation through a CAREER award (#1554178).