English

ACN-Sim: An Open-Source Simulator for Data-Driven Electric Vehicle Charging Research

Systems and Control 2021-01-18 v2 Systems and Control

Abstract

ACN-Sim is a data-driven, open-source simulation environment designed to accelerate research in the field of smart electric vehicle (EV) charging. It fills the need in this community for a widely available, realistic simulation environment in which researchers can evaluate algorithms and test assumptions. ACN-Sim provides a modular, extensible architecture, which models the complexity of real charging systems, including battery charging behavior and unbalanced three-phase infrastructure. It also integrates with a broader ecosystem of research tools. These include ACN-Data, an open dataset of EV charging sessions, which provides realistic simulation scenarios and ACN-Live, a framework for field-testing charging algorithms. It also integrates with grid simulators like MATPOWER, PandaPower and OpenDSS, and OpenAI Gym for training reinforcement learning agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.02809,
  title  = {ACN-Sim: An Open-Source Simulator for Data-Driven Electric Vehicle Charging Research},
  author = {Zachary J. Lee and Sunash Sharma and Daniel Johansson and Steven H. Low},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.02809},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

9 pages, 8 figures. [v2] Update timezone issue with Fig. 8 where x-axis and background load was shifted by 3 hours

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:44:33.548Z