Rush to Charge, Dead to Drive: Application of Deadline Rush Model to Electric Vehicle User’s Charging Behavior
研究了电动汽车用户中类似拖延的充电行为，发现近三分之一频繁用户会拖延到电池几乎没电才充电，且多为小电池用户，可能堵塞充电系统，对充电网络规划有参考价值。
ObjectiveThis work aims to estimate the portion of electric vehicle (EV) users who exhibit procrastination-like behavior, almost equivalent to an "empty" battery, before they decide to charge their vehicles.BackgroundThere is a human tendency to procrastinate when a deadline approaches. Human behavior in the presence of deadlines has been studied in different fields to evaluate individuals' performance or organizational efficiency and effectiveness. However, this phenomenon has not been investigated among EV users.MethodThis study explores users' procrastination-like behavior among 69 Rhode Island public charging stations' data representing 70,611 charging events. The Deadline Rush Model is incorporated to model frequent users' charging profiles. To conduct a robust estimation, the Bayesian Mixture Model is implemented.ResultsWith the selection of an informative prior, the Bayesian Mixture Model estimated that almost one-third of frequent users procrastinate charging.ConclusionThe majority of procrastination-like users have small battery sizes. Although procrastination-like users need to charge when they arrive at a location, that might not necessarily be true for a plug-in hybrid; thus, systematically, they can clog the system for other users whose needs are more pressing. Understanding unique and unexplored charging behaviors among EV users is beneficial to EV infrastructure stakeholders in reducing the adoption threshold by providing a reliable and ubiquitous charging network.ApplicationThe findings identify a different kind of demand on the EV infrastructure than previously modeled and can directly influence future decision-making criteria in terms of planning to optimize to accommodate EV drivers with different charging behaviors.