About EV Roaming
EV Roaming enables EV drivers to charge at each charging station and manages the billing of the charge action towards the driver. Condition is an open charging infrastructure for electric drivers. It means a shared use of charging infrastructure, independent of technology, without fiscal and legal obstacles.
(source: RVO, Electric vehicle charging definitions)
EV roaming allows any EV driver to charge at any charging station, without needing different passes for different providers. Roaming make the charging experience transparent, simple and uniform, even across borders.
Allowing EV drivers from different service providers to charge on all kind of charge stations from different operators and owners generates volume and removes barriers to buy an electric vehicle. This will also result in more customers for service providers and more charge transactions for operators and charge station owners. It creates a transparent market place.
About OCPI
The Open Charge Point Interface protocol (OCPI) supports connections between eMobility Service Providers who have EV drivers as customers, and Charge Point Operators who manage charge stations. This protocol is free to use and independent. It can work both bilateral as well as in combination with roaming hubs.
Users describe OCPI as stable, reliable and secure. The fact that the protocol is used so intensively means that it is constantly being improved, drawing on feedback and new developments in the market. But most important: OCPI is open and independent, royalty-free for everyone, without any party claiming intellectual property rights.
OCPI is used intensively throughout Europe, and in the USA.
OCPI originated in the Netherlands, pioneering country in electric transport. The Dutch/Belgian branch organization eViolin adopted OCPI as standard in an early stage. Since then, many organizations have followed suit. You can find OCPI-based providers and operators in many countries at this moment, including (but not limited to): Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Poland, but also USA, Canada, India, South Africa, etc.
As an open standard, OCPI is developed by the OCPI Community. Currently, over sixty participants have already signed the Contributor License Agreement (CLA), and this number is growing. These are active developers, the number of parties making use of OCPI is much higher.
The current official release of OCPI is version 2.2. In December 2019, the first design setup of OCPI 3.0 was published. Version 3.0 will contain major changes, mainly in the architecture. This will improve the efficiency of OCPI. Several other new foreseen functionalities include: ISO15118 support, statuses for CDRs, support for sending meter values to DSOs, contract management support, implementation and test support and possibilities.
The World Trade Organization Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade (WTO TBT) developed a number of criteria: transparency, openness, impartiality and consensus, effectiveness and relevance, coherence, development dimension. TU/e has researched how OCPI compares to other standards on these criteria:
