Design and simulation of a Battery Swapping System for public transport

Nowadays, the automotive industry faces one of the biggest transformations ever. As the concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and global crude oil demand grow, the automotive industry undergoes a change towards the use of electric vehicles (EVs) over traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. For a greater revolution, EVs need to point out issues such as long charging times, insufficient charging infrastructure, low battery performance, high price, fleet electrification, as well as powering renewable energy-based charging grids. As a result of these problems, vehicle manufacturers have started to investigate and invest in more cost-efficient and innovative solutions to engage with the issues related to using electric vehicles. For instance, in order to overcome the long battery charging times, the battery swapping systems (BSS) have been introduced. BSS can be described as the service station in which depleted batteries can be exchanged with fully charged batteries in a fast and functional way without experiencing the waiting times. The recharge of the battery will then be carried out at a later time. The thesis discusses the design and simulation of a BSS solution for public transport, in order to evaluate the potentiality of its application. As a case study, the simulation model is built with respect to the buses operating in the city of Turin. Therefore, the characteristics of batteries and the number of buses circulating are selected appropriately. Several experiments are executed through FlexSim, a 3D simulation modeling and analysis software, to obtain the adequate size of the battery swapping station for retaining the desired public transportation services and to find out which factors can cause the station to underperform. The most suitable solution is chosen through a multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA).