Towards Sustainable Electric Transportation Systems

January 27, 2017, Webb 1100

Mahnoosh Alizadeh

UCSB, ECE

Abstract

A key challenge for modernizing our infrastructure is in capturing the close interplay of three major elements that affect their operations: physical control mechanisms, information technology, and economic and social aspects introduced by humans and retailers in the loop. This talk examines this important challenge in the context of emerging electric transportation systems. Obstacles faced towards significantly increasing the number of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in transportation systems are two-fold. First, we lack control mechanisms that recommend potential charging plans or allocate charging spots to EVs, leading to driver range anxiety on some routes as well as possibly long wait times to find a spot at popular locations. Second, EVs are expected to disrupt the electric utilities’ business due to their significant electricity consumption, which may not be aligned with the grid's generation capacity. Moreover, uncontrolled EV charging can negatively impact electricity distribution networks. In this talk, we discuss a modeling framework that enables us to design congestion management and pricing schemes towards coordinating the operations of the multiple players in this picture. Our objective is to guide the EV population to use transportation, charging, and power system infrastructure more efficiently.

Speaker's Bio

Mahnoosh Alizadeh is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Alizadeh’s research is focused on designing scalable control and data analytic frameworks and market mechanisms for enabling sustainability and resiliency in societal infrastructure systems (e.g., power systems, transportation systems, the cloud) and smart cities. She is the director of the Smart Infrastructure Systems laboratory.
Prior to joining UCSB, Dr. Alizadeh spent two years at Stanford University as a postdoctoral scholar. She received her PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California Davis in 2014 and her B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2009.