National charging facilities for electric road vehicles: a quantitative assessment based on the application of the queueing theory.

The automotive industry in Europe is facing a troubled situation. The concept of car based on the conventional internal combustion engine (ICE), according to the product life cycle, results to be placed between the maturity and decline phase, for a number of reasons (availability of crude oil at popular prices, local pollution reasons, climate change,…). Furthermore, the market is saturated by this product and the industry must deal with an overcapacity in relation to the production. To this scenario the progressively increasing environmental concerns and the recent arguments related to the pollution issues have to be added. The various manufactures are forced to take tangible actions. A widely and easily accepted solution seems to be the electric vehicle. The automotive industry has heavily moved towards this direction, both through battery electric vehicles and electrified powertrains. Since then, the efforts were focused on solving the main issues or the ones that are deemed to be of the electric vehicle. A good example are the many research papers dealing with battery range in relation to the vehicle’s mileage. However, there is an aspect that does not result to have been analysed properly in literature, namely: how the customer habits will be modified due to the shift from the refuelling process to the recharging one. Therefore, the goal of this M.Sc. work is to analyse this specific topic focusing on the Italian situation, providing both quantitative and qualitative answers. In order to gather the last ones, the refuelling and recharging processes are analysed with the aim to build a model properly representing them. The model follows the principles of a Monte Carlo simulation based on the queueing theory. The main outcome is represented by the average waiting time and the number of needed channels (charging spots, either private or publicly accessible), that are key indicators useful to assess and define viable scenarios for the mobility of the population.