The current EV charging approach is focused on public usage, but absolutely inefficient for charging enterprise fleets.
Flumen is a scheduling based, electric vehicle charging management system focusing on the needs of enterprises. It brings measurable ROI in the form of less energy cost, and highly increased vehicle availability.
Why is Flumen revolutionary?When employees arrive to the company's parking lot, they try to find a free charging plug, connect their vehicles, and start charging immediately. This brings a first comes first served approach. Since a full charging session may take as long as 4-6 hours, charging stations can fully charge 2-3 cars during a work day. When a charger plug is freed, no one knows about it, so pure luck controls which cars are charged.
This approach is unacceptable for enterprises, where those cars need to be charged first, which have the most important tasks.
Although it would be a logical solution, but in 99% of office parking lots and garages there is not enough power available at the electric distribution board to charge all cars. Expanding the electrical input of the premises can be extremely expensive.
That's why there are much less charging stations than cars. The results are:
This leads to bad Return on Investment for electric vehicles.
Enterprises need as many charging stations which allow to plug in each car which arrives to the parking lot. Since the distribution panel's power limit rule still applies, in this case "plugged in" does not mean instant "charging".
Flumen's cloud based central system receives charging reservations, calculates the optimal charging schedule, and controls the output of the charging stations (which cars are charged, in which order, and how much power they get).
The charging schedule considers a lot of parameters: the technical parameters of the cars, the planned routes, the environmental characteristics, the arrival and departure times, the enterprise priorities, the available power at the distribution panel, the electricity price changes, etc.
This central system needs information and rules to calculate the best charging schedule, and charge the vehicles as much as they need to fulfil their next routes. It can be feed with necessary data by enterprise systems (fleet management, route management, energy management, Outlook, etc.), and by mobile app (for ad hoc charging reservations).
