Switch at ICNC 2022: Plug and Charge, now also for AC chargers

6th International ISO 15118 Interoperability and Conformance Testing Symposium

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The time has come again for another international testing symposium, formally known as the 6th International ISO/IEC 15118 Interoperability and Conformance Testing Symposium. This time it will be held in Versailles, France, from June 22nd to June 23rd, at VEDECOM.

Five intense days of shaping the future of e-mobility charging

The testing symposium in Versailles which is hosted by VEDECOM is co-located with the next ISO/IEC 15118 Joint Working Group (JWG1) meeting during which the committee members will work on the second edition of ISO 15118. I wrote a little bit about the second edition in my blog post end of September last year. Edition 2 of ISO 15118-2 has been released as a second Committee Draft (CD) in March this year. The release date of this CD2 stage (March 14) also marked the start of the commenting phase which lasts until mid of May 2017. This means that the respective national delegations need to collect all the editorial and technical comments which the experts in each country have provided for the CD2 document and then jointly submit those comments as a national view on Edition 2 of ISO 15118-2.
The JWG meeting in June will thus more or less mark the beginning of the work during which all comments will be reviewed and a proper solution will be found for each issue. The meeting itself will take place from Monday (June 19) til Wednesday (June 21).

Focus of the testing symposium

The organising committee of the ISO/IEC 15118 JWG invites companies working in this area and their representatives to participate in this two-day (plug-in) electric vehicle (EV) charging communication protocol testing symposium starting on June 22nd. The focus will be on conformance testing - meaning: if the corresponding implementation conforms to the requirements given in ISO 15118-2 Edition 1 - and cross-vendor interoperability. There will be various 2h test slots each day during which the respective EVs and charging stations (EVSEs) with power flow as well as just their respective communication controllers (EVCC and SECC, without power flow) will be tested against each other. In the scope of these tests will be the respective implementations of ISO 15118-2/-3, SAE J2847/2, SAE J2931/1, SAE J2931/4, and DIN 70121.

SAE stands for the Society of Automotive Engineers which defines a family of standards for the North American market that is supposed to have the same functionality as the standardised charge plugs (on the hardware side) and ISO 15118 (on the software side) do.

And in case anyone wonders what DIN 70121 is - it is a German Pre-Standard which was released before ISO 15118 was ready in order to get some early momentum in the market. DIN 70121 focuses on DC charging and does not include TLS (Transport Layer Security) secured communication. Therefore, no certificate based authentication and authorisation using Plug & Charge is applied. DIN 70121 is supposed to fade out, although it is still listed as one of the implementations to be tested.

The outcome of this testing symposium will be valuable feedback for all participants in the EV charging communications community. Knowledge gained can be used to improve implementations and to refine test cases, test procedures, and test apparatus/software.

All further information including the invitation letter as well as the registration are provided on the testing symposium website. Registration closes on 15th of May 2017 (EOD, CET). You can register either as someone who brings testing equipment or as an observer.

RISE V2G will be onboard

I will be attending both the JWG meeting from Monday til Wednesday and the testing symposium. The last testing symposium in Seoul revealed the first working implementations of Plug & Charge including secured communication via TLS, certificate installation and update and application of digital signatures.

I hope to see a lot more implementations at the upcoming June event which will provide a complete implementation of Plug & Charge, because that's where it gets really interesting. As always, I will bring my RISE V2G open source implementation (GitHub) with me and hope to be able to verify my implementations of both the EVCC and SECC side against as many testing partners as possible. All lessons learned and possible improvements will be integrated into the RISE V2G stack.

Be perfectly prepared for the upcoming testing symposium

In case you want to go deep on ISO 15118 and need to fully understand how this communication protocol works, then feel free to have a look at the ISO 15118 Manual. This includes everything you need to know about the protocol itself, the applied cryptography, digital certificates and signatures needed for Plug & Charge.

Marc Mültin

Marc, the Founder and CEO of Switch, has over 13 years of experience in the e-mobility space and holds a PhD in Computer Science. He is the leading global expert and co-author of international EV communication standards (ISO 15118 & OCPP 2.0.1) that underpin the Switch platform.

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Marc Mültin