Modelling social patterns of plug-in electric vehicles drivers for dynamic simulations

The impact that plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) can have on low voltage distribution grids is widely influenced by charging and driving patterns of PEV users. Those impacts may be reduced using passive or active charging strategies. In this contest, a wide range of solutions can be found in the literature seeking not only to improve distribution grid reliability and performance but also get economic profits. However, the effectiveness of those charging strategies is affected by driving and charging behaviour. Thus, it is important to develop a model of drivers´ behaviour in order to determine whether a specific charging strategy is a suitable solution. This paper presents a new algorithm to model driving and charging behaviour, which uses stochastic data based on real data collected in 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). However, the presented algorithm can be easily adapted to data obtained from other surveys.