Towards Mass Adoption of Electric Vehicles and a Sustainable Future: Infrastructure Design and Service Operations Management for Battery Swapping and Fast Charging Facilities

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The research objective of this award is to design effective models and systems for the electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure industry, with the eventual goal of facilitating mass adoption of EVs and creating a sustainable green transportation sector. The successful mass adoption of EVs hinges on the accessibility of supporting infrastructure for these facilities. This research will study the EV infrastructure industry from a logistics and economics angle, and provide effective optimization models and systems that can be applied in practice to assist complicated decision making, evaluate the effectiveness of policies, and provide real-time operations control. Robust and dynamic optimization models, that utilize state-of-the-art methodologies in distributionally-robust stochastic programming, mixed-integer conic optimization, decomposition and approximation techniques, and stochastic dynamic control with online learning will be developed. Beyond applications, this research will also contribute to the theory of these approaches. If successful, the outcomes of the project will facilitate the revolution toward mass adoption of EVs and a sustainable future. Models and tools made possible by the research can help the industry design more efficient and cost effective EV infrastructure. The project will contribute to the training of industry professionals through the UC Berkeley Master of Engineering program in energy systems. The project will also benefit from close collaboration and partnership with leading industry sanctioners. Finally, the project will mentor and support student researchers who will continue research in green transportation during their future academic careers.