AI Squared: AI enhancements for Anti-ICEing solution

The UK Government has committed £1.6 billion to expand public electric vehicle charging infrastructure to further decarbonise transportation as part of net-zero targets until 2030, in response to rapidly increasing electric vehicle sales.

EV charging networks and Local Authorities require efficient management of their charging infrastructure to provide satisfactory service to EV drivers as well as maximise their revenue. Additionally, many business drivers like taxis and couriers rely on high availability of charging infrastructure to minimise downtime, reduce journey times, and maximise revenue. With high demand for charging infrastructure in some areas, ensuring its availability when required is of vital importance.

However, some EV charging infrastructure is routinely inaccessible due to bay-hogging (overstaying of EV vehicles after they are fully charged) or ICEing, which describes the process of an non-electric vehicle using the charging bay as parking bay. Access to electric vehicle charging infrastructure is crucial for the widespread adoption of EVs and the decarbonization of transportation.

However, state-of-the-art solutions have thus far typically used fixed hardware, which is costly to install and maintain, and have been heavily reliant on human operators to manually capture, evaluate and enforce evidence prior to issuing a penalty charge notice.

In response to this, Charge Saint has been developed. Charge Saint is an innovative mobile app that allows EV drivers to report ICEing and bay blocking incidents. Charge Saint is collecting an increasing number of citizen-generated, high-quality reports, but the verification of these reports is largely a manual process.

There is a need to streamline the report verification process and minimise the time required for verification of ICEing and bay blocking incidents by a human operator, ultimately enhancing efficiency of Charge Saint and the uptake of the solution.

An AI-based information verification system is proposed for Charge Saint to streamline the report verification and enforcement process. This system will minimise the requirement for human verification and thus make Charge Saint less resource intensive for charging networks and cash strapped Local Authorities. This shall in turn ensure that Charge Saint not only generates and protects revenue from charging infrastructure, but shall reduce the personnel time and costs associated with the solution, while ensuring improved access to EV charging infrastructure to accelerate EV adoption.