Optimizing electric vehicle fleets to develop smart charging infrastructure: a digital twin approach

Abstract The accelerated shift to green transportation demands new ideas to perform effective management of charging systems for electric vehicles (EVs). This paper explores the approaches of digital twins (DTs) to manage smart charging powered by renewable energy along with grid supply integration to EV fleets. DTs create a virtual environment that enables energy flow, charging times, and grid connections by modelling various parameters of charging stations. The DT also supports forecasting techniques, enhanced usage of renewable energy, and battery storage handling to improve performance and reduce operational costs to promote environmental friendliness. The work also gives important insights into the necessity of DTs in smart charging, related operational constraints, and the relevance of DTs in community-based sustainable development. This paper similarly emphasizes the crucial role of DTs in improving the management and control of EV fleets, resulting in greater independence and shorter payback periods while establishing the foundation for future and scalable applications. DTs offer ample opportunities in this domain, and this research aims to open new avenues to enable future developments that aim to expand the DTs’ functionality for wider energy applications by refining optimization tools with greater energy efficiency. This work comprehensively highlights the potential of DTs and their crucial role in promoting future transportation along with a few limitations like data latency and cybersecurity-related issues to enable seamless integration of EVs with the virtual counterparts.