Software in the EV space

Software in the EV space is a super wide topic. There's OCPP, which allows us to control chargers. OCPI, which allows us to publish available public chargers on various networks. ISO-15118, which gets more nitty-gritty and allows us to receive data from both chargers and vehicles. And a ton more - it's a world of acronyms and standards and protocols, but at the end of the day, we have node apps in kubernetes clusters controlling distributed physical hardware (the chargers).

We're solving some interesting problems - EV charger comms go over cell networks, so there's connectivity problems built right in. Chargers hold onto data while offline, but that amount of data varies and runtime decisions have to be made when a charger comes back online. I could probably talk for days about the whole problem space, but a high-level primer may make more sense for this talk.

My teams specifically build software that manage the flow of energy to electric vehicles. We have fleets of thousands of chargers across the globe, which we maintain direct websocket connections to and control via a protocol called OCPP. Last year, we also launched the first OEM public charging network (Ford Charge Network), which allows the general public to charge their EVs at various locations across the US and Canada. There are a ton of other features we've built - power company integrations to help charge cheaply, complex authorization logic to determine whether a vehicle should be able to charge at a specific charger, EV route planning to ensure the vehicle receives enough energy before departure, provisioning systems for tracking the physical charger's lifecycle from manufacturing to installation to eventual decommissioning. Faults and error states, ton of reporting (built on kafka with the event-sourcing paradigm).

I'm excited to talk about the EV charging ecosystem and the role software plays in that - chargers talk to vehicles, chargers and vehicles talk to our central systems, our systems talk to utilities, payment providers, public charging networks, etc. and all this is enabled by software.