Light-weight Communication Fault Tolerant OCPP-based EV Supply Equipment

The wide spread of electric vehicles (EVs) requires EV charging stations to be always widely and reliably accessible. This means that charging stations and their management systems need to be developed in a way to handle unexpected situations and operating conditions. In this paper, an EV charging system is designed to be light-weight and to tolerate communication faults. Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) 2.0.1 is implemented on a low-cost microcontroller with a support for WiFi and LTE communication. The designed EV charger is able to handle and recover from situations when connection is lost while keeping normal operation from the user’s point of view. An OCPP management system is developed and deployed on a public server and a hardware prototype is built. Results show that the system is functional and is able to handle communication faults and restorations seamlessly.