ABRP inexplicably skipping charging stations (again)

[irwinr]

Description: I'm planning a trip from Austin to Florida. For some reason ABRP refuses to plan stopping at the EA stations in either Vidor, TX or Sulphur, LA.

Type: Webpage

Link to Plan: https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=83221355-fc48-4a9b-a8fa-354bf98bf4fe

Replication Steps:

1. Click link above.
2. Observe that both EA stations show that they have available and working CCS stations. Why are they being skipped?
3. See screenshot below

[irwinr]

As an addendum: I tried lowering my "Charger Max SoC" to try and encourage it to stop at one of those stations instead of making me wait until Hammond, LA where it was wanting me to charge to 90% to make it to the next stop.

However it is limiting my overnight hotel charge at the Hampton Inn to 70%, even though I specified charging to 100% on that specific waypoint:

 

Obviously the "Charger Max SOC" is meant to apply to fast chargers, not overnight hotel stops.

-Jeremy

[Bo-ABRP]

Sorry for the slow response! This turns out to be a bug/feature due to the charger max SoC limit. This has now been fixed, and your plan runs well. Thanks for reporting!

[irwinr]

Hi Bo,

As I said in my last post, I only tried adding the charger max SoC as a way to force it to stop. I see the issue even when I don't use that feature.

Take the same plan above and remove the max SoC limit. You'll see it wants me to sit at Breaux Bridge EA station for almost an hour to charge the car to 86% instead of just having me stop at the Hammond charger:

 

I was lowering my max charge SoC to 70% because my car (The Kia Niro EV) slows down charging after 55% and slows considerably after 70%. There's no way it's faster to sit at those slower charging rates all the way to 86% vs adding a stop in Hammond.

 

In fact: if I manually add a stop in Hammond, the total trip time decreases from 22:12 to 22:11. However that's because it still has me charging to 76% in Breaux Bridge! if I'm stopping in Hammond I would unplug at 55% as soon as my charge begins to taper. Leaving Breaux Bridge at 55% would still have me arriving at Hammond with 15% SoC when I arrive in Hammond (My charger arrival SoC is only 5%) so why on earth would I continue charging to 76% if I can make it easily with 55% where my charge power starts to taper?

If I manually cap the charge SoC at breaux Bridge at 55% it drops my total trip time to 22:09 and I get a much more sane looking set of stops:

 

 

I don't understand why it's so adamant about skipping perfectly good chargers that can save you time (And money on the EA chargers that charge by the minute vs by kWh)?

Edited April 20, 2021 by irwinr
Pictures were in wrong order.

[Ou Boet]

Just taking a shot in the dark here, but what value do you have for "Charging Overhead".  I believe that it is 5 mins by default.  This value can affect ABRP's charge stop planning dramatically.  The penalty for each stop is the time to charge, plus the "Charging Overhead" period.  Is some cases, although counterintuitive, it can make a longer stop (even though your average charge rate might be lower) quicker in the long run.

[irwinr]

18 hours ago, Ou Boet said:

Just taking a shot in the dark here, but what value do you have for "Charging Overhead".  I believe that it is 5 mins by default.  This value can affect ABRP's charge stop planning dramatically.  The penalty for each stop is the time to charge, plus the "Charging Overhead" period.  Is some cases, although counterintuitive, it can make a longer stop (even though your average charge rate might be lower) quicker in the long run.

It's set at 1 minute, the lowest it'll let me set it to.

But it doesn't matter: The "charging overhead" time is factored into the total trip time. So when I force it to make an additional stop the total time goes down (And that total time includes the charging overhead time). If the charging overhead time was causing the trip time to increase then I could understand that behavior, but it's not. Even with the charging overhead factored in (And with it set to only 1 minute) it's still skipping chargers that when manually added cause the total trip time to decrease (Which again, total trip time includes charging overhead time so if that was the cause, total trip time should increase not decrease when the stops are manually added.)