Press pack Paris, 20 June 2012 Investing for the future The "INFINI DRIVE" project for the development of electric vehicle recharging infrastructures has been selected by ADEME (French Environment and Energy Management Agency) Launched on the initiative of the La Poste Group and ERDF, Infini Drive, the consultancy project aimed at designing a system for recharging their new fleet of electric vehicles, has been selected par ADEME for inclusion in the government's "Vehicles of the future" programme, and in this respect will benefit from the "Investissements d'avenir" (Investing for the future) programme. The aim is to help create a "standard" for company and local authority fleets and thereby to foster the development and deployment of electric vehicles. The project will be presented for the first time on Thursday 21 st June during a workshop dedicated to electric vehicle projects at the SG Paris 2012 congress. To see this R&D project through to completion, a consortium of experts from industry, the service sector, academia and research community has been formed. This top-level multidisciplinary team has set itself the goal of designing, with a pragmatic and progressive approach, a system for managing recharging infrastructures that will allow economically viable and ecologically sustainable deployment of fleets of electric vehicles. The La Poste Group and ERDF, as public service companies that are totally committed to sustainable development, have initiated the Infini Drive project.
The La Poste Group will bring its experience in the field of sustainable management of fleets and carbon-free vehicles. As for ERDF, it will bring its expertise as regards power distribution network management, which it constantly adapts and modernizes in the face of new challenges such as the development of the electric vehicle. Users' habits and needs will be central to this R&D project, which unites ERDF and La Poste employees in this project's experiments as its key contributors. In addition to the experience of the La Poste Group and ERDF, the consortium will benefit from the expertise of DOCAPOST BPO (Extelia) and Greenovia, two La Poste Group subsidiaries specialized respectively in data management and carbon-free vehicle fleet management and innovative projects. ERDF will rely on the laboratories of EDF R&D to design the recharging control system, and G 2 Mobility, a young innovating company, will construct a prototype control system. This consortium also includes three research laboratories. LORIA-UMR (Mines de Nancy) will determine the uses relating to operational activities, and CMA (Applied Mathematics Centre - ARMINES) will study the mathematical control model. The I3M laboratory of Nice Sophia Antipolis and South Toulon Var University will bring its expertise in communication on changes brought about by the advent of electric vehicles. The consortium will hold wider consultations with other parties affected by this project. Designing an ecosystem for the electric vehicle The La Poste Group, which had already set up an electric car procurement grouping that in 2011 led to an initial record order for 18,711 vehicle (including 10,000 for La Poste), is thus taking things one step further by playing an active part in the design of the "ecosystem" for its range of electric vehicles. As electrical mobility cannot be achieved without adapting the electric networks, ERDF, which manages the power distribution networks for 95% of the country, has thus naturally put itself forward as a partner to implement this project, which among other things aims to optimize the connection of recharging terminals and control them to avoid costly and carbon-hungry peak demand periods. in addition, ERDF has a large fleet of vehicles (25,000, plus 1,500 to 2,500 electric vehicles within the framework of the buying group). This consortium will endeavour to develop a programme intended to become a benchmark for the industrial offer of recharging infrastructures, thereby contributing to
the standardization of their design, a prerequisite for the widespread introduction of electric vehicles. At the end of the Infini Drive project, a "Green Paper on captive fleet recharging infrastructures" will be published, in the same way as the existing Green Paper on public recharging infrastructures. More information on the Infini Drive project? Attend a presentation of the Infini Drive project on Thursday 21 st June from 9.30 to 10.00 during a workshop on electric vehicle projects. This workshop is part of the SG Paris 2012 congress dedicated to smart grids. Find out more at: http://www.sgparis2012.com/327-atelier-salle-2 Press contacts ERDF press service Alizée Gervais alizee.gervais@erdfdistribution.fr 0147477598 La Poste press service David Drujon david2.drujon@laposte.fr 0155442236
The consortium's partners The La Poste Group La Poste, a totally publicly-owed Société anonyme ( public limited company) since 1 st March 2010, is an original model of a multi-trade group structured around four activities: letter post, parcels and express delivery, post office banking and Enseigne La Poste. Every year, the 17,000 contact points of La Poste receive 45 million private customers and 3.5 million business customers. La Poste's industrial structure enables it to process and convey 26 billion items a year. The La Poste group posted sales of 21.3 billion euros in 2011. After steering the electric vehicle ordering consortium that furthered the emergence of the market in France, and after leading the "experimental charging infrastructures for carbon-free vehicles" focus group at the request of the government, the La Poste Group pursues its commitment to sustainable mobility by contributing all its expertise in managing sustainable fleets to this project. With more than 10,000 electric cars to be deployed between 2012 and 2015, and a whole range of electric vehicles that have already been deployed (280 cars, 210 quads and 10,000 electric power-assisted bicycles), La Poste will be a representative experimental model for designing optimal recharging infrastructures for users, and the post viable in economic and ecological terms. ERDF
Électricité Réseau Distribution France (ERDF), formed on 1 January 2008, manages 95% of the electricity distribution networks in metropolitan France. The company, with a workforce of 35,000, operates, develops and maintains 1.3 million km of electric lines serving 35 million customers. In this capacity it carries out numerous operations on this network such as connections, entries into service, repairs and changes of supplier. Electricity distributor and fleet operator for these 35,000 employees, ERDF operates and maintains the electricity distribution network. As part of its public service remit, the company connects EV recharging infrastructures. Its expertise will contribute to a "standard" control model for them that is consistent with network modernization and environmental challenges. GREENOVIA GREENOVIA, a subsidiary of La Poste, offers public and private-sector companies design and consultancy services in the fields of carbon-free vehicle management, vehicle fleets, new services and mobility. Coordinator of the Infini Drive project, Greenovia will coordinate all the work and partners of the project. Greenovia brings its innovative project management methods and know-how in transport and mobility, with studies of the carbon data ecosystem and carbon balance. Greenovia will draft the project summary entitled "Green Paper on captive fleet recharging infrastructures". Mines de Nancy/LORIA LORIA-UMR7503 (a Lorraine-based computing and applications research laboratory) is a joint research unit common to CNRS, INRIA and the University of Lorraine. LORIA has acquired a reputation that clearly places it at the forefront of computing laboratories, and is recognized at both national and international level.
The Infini Drive project represents for the laboratory an opportunity to tackle new scientific challenges relating to the recharging and operation of electric vehicles. LORIA's contribution to the Infini Drive project will be to design optimized usage models for electric vehicles and to develop decision support tools for planning and controlling vehicle charging that factor in business constraints. Among other things, the laboratory has for 3 years assisted the La Poste Group in modelling production activities, both at mail processing centres and at mail distribution platforms. It has demonstrated its skills in optimizing processing postmen's tasks and routes and in the stratification of distribution centres. G2 Mobility G²mobility, an SME formed in 2009, designs ground-breaking infrastructures solutions enabling companies and public authorities to introduce the electric vehicle appropriately into new areas of mobility, by factoring in the dimensions of uses, energy optimization and the environment. In the Infini Drive project, G²mobility will contribute its R&D skills and capacities in the fields of embedded electronics, telecommunications and the development of advanced information systems. DOCAPOST BPO DOCAPOST BPO is the division dedicated to outsourced management of processes and the customer relationship. DOCAPOST BPO has expertise in interoperable systems involving a great many participants and their diverse information systems. DOCAPOST BPO will ensure interoperability of the information systems in the Infini Drive project. In this capacity, DOCAPOST BPO will develop the necessary interfaces, in conjunction with the partners concerned. Special attention will be paid to the architecture in order to guarantee seamless intermediation between the information systems while
also that they can be de-linked whenever necessary to avoid critical incidents being propagated between them. In this respect, DOCAPOST BPO contributes the Information Technology building block to the project and will implement a data stream management platform between the partners and deployed systems (vehicles, smart communication devices, ERDF network information, etc.). DOCAPOST BPO will also develop electric vehicle supervision interfaces: Fleet control, economic and ecological assessment, operational monitoring I3M laboratory "Information, environments, media, mediation" I3M is an information and communication sciences laboratory of the University of Nice- Sophia Antipolis and the University of the South-Toulon-Var. Its ambition is to conceive all technical developments and social and cultural evolution, human interactions and interactions between man and machine, using studies of concrete objects on a microsocial scale. Social and technical communication devices are thus central to its project, in particular those that are part of the social and ecological transition policies of businesses or local and regional authorities. The I3M laboratory brings to the Infini Drive project an original and complementary dimension: the sociocultural dimension and naturally the informational and communication dimension of uses. It will question the relevance and efficiency, both collective and individual, of change support mechanisms aimed at promoting social acceptance of innovations and new behaviour patterns of user employees imposed by the technological pro environmental transformations of the vehicle of the future as experimented with by the project's other partners. ARMINES - CMA
ARMINES is a non-profit contractual research structure set up on the initiative of the Ministry of Industry. The ARMINES research centre involved in this Infini Drive project is the Applied Mathematics Centre of MINES-ParisTech. It brings to the project its expertise as regards optimization through the development of algorithms, within the framework of a public-private partnership the interactions of which will foster the emergence of a better scientific vision of the carbon impact of captive fleet electric vehicle recharging policies.