User:Fbuve/sandbox

Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP)
The Open Charge Point Protocol, or OCPP in short, is a vendor-independent communication protocol for use between charging stations and a central system to provide authorisation of users and the recording of charge transactions.

History
OCPP was developed in 2010 by Logica as part of their charge point management system, CiMS, on behalf of foundation e-laad.nl in The Netherlands. E-laad.nl was founded by the eight major grid operators in The Netherlands, who decided to join forces in order to deploy a network of 10.000 charging stations throughout the country. E-laad.nl wanted to use charging stations from different manufacturers, but did not want to use different back-office systems for each manufacturer. Therefore Logica developed a new open protocol (OCPP) on behalf of e-laad.nl to communicate with charging stations. OCPP was soon implemented by several leading charge point manufacturers.

Brief description
OCPP is designed as a web-service and is based on SOAP version 1.2. As such, OCPP can be used over any transport medium that supports HTTP traffic. In most situations charging stations will connect using a wireless GPRS connection. Because charging stations may be idle most of their time, OCPP does not require an "always on" connection. The connection may be dropped between commands. OCPP supports off-line operation of charging stations, e.g. when the wireless connection is temporarily unavailable. Off-line charging stations may continue to operate using a local authorisation list of previously authorised or explicitly uploaded user IDs. While off-line, OCPP commands are queued and sent to the central system when the connection is restored.

OCPP supports commands for transactions (e.g. Authorise, Start Transaction and Stop Transaction) and for remote management (e.g. Reset, Unlock Connector and Update Firmware).

The full specification of OCPP can be obtained at the OCPP web-site and user forum: ocppforum.net.

Evolution of OCPP
In order to support further development and acceptance of OCPP, e-laad.nl has initiated a steering committee for the development of OCPP, together with ESB of Ireland, that selected OCPP as standard protocol for charging stations. In January 2012 the steering committee organised a two-day international working group in Amsterdam with participants from The Netherlands, Belgium, France, United Kingdom and Germany to define specifications for the next OCPP release, that was published in May 2012. In September 2012 a second international working group took place in Amsterdam with participants from 11 countries.