Geodesy & Geomatics Engineering

We are pleased to announce that René Richard will be defending his M.Sc.E. thesis on Tuesday, Oct. 19 at 9 a.m. ADT. René worked under the supervision of Prof Ian Church (GGE, UNB) and Prof Monica Wachowicz (Civil Eng., UNB / Geospatial Sciences, RMIT University, Melbourne). All faculty members and graduate students are invited to attend. Contact Lisa Valenta (l.valenta@unb.ca) to request a link to this virtual event.

The thesis is titled Analysis of EV Charging Station Clusters Using a Novel Representation of Temporally Varying Structures.

Abstract

Transport electrification introduces new opportunities in supporting sustainable mobility. Fostering Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption integrates vehicle range and infrastructure deployment concerns. An understanding of EV charging patterns is crucial for optimizing charging infrastructure placement and managing costs.

Clustering EV charging events has been useful for ensuring service consistency and increasing EV adoption. However, clustering presents challenges for practitioners when first selecting the appropriate hyperparameter combination for an algorithm and later when assessing the quality of clustering results. Ground truth information is usually not available for practitioners to validate the discovered patterns. As a result, it is harder to judge the effectiveness of different modelling decisions since there is no objective way to compare them.

This work proposes a clustering process that allows for the creation of relative rankings of similar clustering results. The overall goal is to support users by allowing them to compare a clustering result of interest against other similar groupings over multiple temporal granularities. The efficacy of this analytical process is demonstrated with a case study using real-world EV charging event data from charging station operators in New Brunswick.