Ford Motor Company manufactures and sells Ford and Lincoln cars and trucks across six continents with 224,000 employees and 90 plants worldwide.

Ford has begun producing and selling electric vehicles like the Ford Focus Electric. As the popularity of electric vehicles increases, so does the need for charging stations.

To meet the increased demand at their headquarters, Ford provides numerous charging stations throughout their Dearborn campus.

Our Electric Vehicle Charging Station App enables Ford employees to locate unoccupied charging stations on their Dearborn campus via a map and set notifications for when a charging station becomes available, all using their iPhone.

In addition to finding charging stations, our app reminds employees to move their car after it has been parked at a station for more than four hours. A leaderboard keeps track of who follows this recommendation and displays it in the app.

Our system uses Bluetooth devices called Estimote Beacons. Employees obtain and register a Beacon, which they place in their car. The charging station senses the presence of their Beacon and marks the station as occupied by that employee, which updates the employee’s iPhone app.

Our Electric Vehicle Charging Station App is written in Objective-C. The web services backend is written in Java using the Spring framework. An OpenLDAP server handles our user authentication and storage. A Microsoft SQL Server database stores all other relevant data.