6. Third Case Study: An Electric Vehicle Charging Protocol

Modern-day renewable and smart energy systems are increasingly playing an important role in our societies. Electric vehicle charging service infrastructures are becoming ever more popular and accessible, although at a pace not well understood yet in terms of the reliability and security of this new paradigm. Often, solutions are rolled out to the market with little or no analysis of their resilience and even at the standards level, specifications of systems and protocols often omit or skim over the question of reliability. This chapter will present a new formal approach for analysing the effects of single failures on process algebraic specifications used often in specifying communication protocols. This new approach is applied to one part of an international standard protocol, the Open Charge Point Protocol, for electric vehicle charging, and demonstrates how the effects of specification faults can impact the safety and security of the protocol. This chapter represents the third case study of analysing modern and complex protocols in the current book.