Electric Vehicles

Energy Efficient Nonlinear Microscopic Dynamical Model for Autonomous and Electric Vehicles

Yeo, Yuneil
Lee, Jaewoong
Scott Moura
Maria Laura Delle Monache
2025

This article proposes a nonlinear microscopic dynamical model for autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs) that considers battery energy efficiency in the car-following dynamics. The model builds upon the Optimal Velocity Model (OVM), with the control term based on the battery dynamics to enable thermally optimal and energy-efficient driving. We rigorously prove that the proposed model achieves lower energy consumption compared to the Optimal Velocity Follow-the-Leader (OVFL) model. Through numerical simulations, we validate the analytical results on the energy efficiency. We additionally...

Integrating Flight and Charging Schedules in Urban Air Mobility

Cao, Shangqing
Jiang, Xuan
Bulusu, Vishwanath
Chakrabarty, Anjan
Mark Hansen
Onat, Emin
Raja Sengupta
Zou, Bo
2024

This paper investigates the simultaneous optimization of flight schedule and charging policy of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for Urban Air Mobility operations. An optimization model is developed for a two-vertiport system to design an efficient flight schedule, including re-balancing flights, and a charging policy that serves a given demand with the objective of minimizing the required fleet size. The results highlight that charging aircraft to a lower State of Charge level during peak demand periods and to a higher level during off-peak times effectively reduces the...

eVTOL Fleet Selection Method for Vertiport Networks

Jasenka Rakas
Jeung, Jeffery
So, Duston
Ambrose, Paul
Chupina, Valeria
2021

To date, there have been over 400 electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) air vehicle designs that vary significantly in terms of design concepts, thrust type, air vehicle size or passenger seating capacity. Our study proposes a method for exploring ranking of passenger eVTOLs for vertiport network routes within large metropolitan regions. The method uses a benchmarking approach to indicate the eVTOLs most suitable to perform in the determined operational envelope. The study includes (i) a database, which was developed from open-source data that contains declared eVTOL performance...

Robust Estimation of State of Charge in Lithium Iron Phosphate Cells Enabled by Online Parameter Estimation and Deep Neural Networks

Shi, Junzhe
Kato, Dylan
Jiang, Shida
Dangwal, Chitra
Scott Moura
2023

This paper addresses the state of charge estimation problem in lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells. LFP cells are particularly challenging because their fat open circuit voltage (OCV) curve means OCV-based battery models are weakly observable. This means standard methods for SOC estimation don't easily converge to the true SOC. Additionally, in practice, estimates must be accurate in the face of biased noise on current input, as well as mean-zero noise on measurements. As such, we aim to create an estimator that is accurate when facing these types of noise. We accomplish this with a...

Distributionally Robust and Data-Driven Solutions to Commercial Vehicle Routing Problems

Keyantuo, Patrick
Wang, Ruiting
Zeng, Teng
Vishwanath, Aashrith
Borhan, Hoseinali
Scott Moura
2023

In this paper, we study the routing of commercial electric trucks through an application of distributionally robust optimization (DRO) for route planning and dispatch. This approach aims to minimize total cost of operation for the fleet, and considers the variability in energy consumption due to uncertain road conditions, traffic, weather and driving behavior. Furthermore, we augment the distributionally robust energy minimizing vehicle routing problem by learning the energy efficiency distribution over a horizon. We show that convergence to the true distribution is achieved while learning...

Advancing Alternative Fuel Aviation Technologies in California

Liu, Yati
Mark Hansen
Ro, Jin Wook
Murphy, Colin W.
2025

The aviation sector in California is facing increased pressure to reduce its carbon footprint, leading to a growing interest in alternative fuel aviation (AFA) technologies such as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), as well as electric- and hydrogen- powered aircraft. The report develops a California Aviation Energy Model (CAVEM), examining various AFA technologies and analyzing possible policy options. The analysis emphasizes the importance of SAF in the short term, with projections indicating sufficient supply for intrastate flights and capped vegetable oil-based fuel consumption. Long-...

Integrating Urban Air Mobility into the Power Grid through Smart Charging Solutions

Wu, Jiaman
Cao, Shangqing
Mark Hansen
Marta Gonzalez
2025

Adapting the existing power grid to support large-scale urban air mobility (UAM) operations using electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft presents a critical infrastructural challenge that needs to be tackled. To this end, this paper presents a framework for estimating the potential of smart charging to improve power system welfare when integrating large-scale UAM into the power grid. We first estimate passenger travel demand for UAM from location-based service (LBS) data. Then we obtain the feasible charging window of aircraft by solving a fleet dispatching problem to...

Planning for Electric Vehicle Needs by Coupling Charging Profiles with Urban Mobility

Xu, Yanyan
Çolak, Serdar
Kara, Emre C.
Scott Moura
Marta Gonzalez
2018

The rising adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) leads to the temporal alignment of their electricity and mobility demands. However, mobility demand has not yet been considered in electricity planning and management. Here, we present a method to estimate individual mobility of PEV drivers at fine temporal and spatial resolution, by integrating three unique datasets of mobile phone activity of 1.39 million Bay Area residents, census data and the PEV drivers survey data. Through coupling the uncovered patterns of PEV mobility with the charging activity of PEVs in 580,000 session...

Planning for Electric Vehicles Coupled with Urban Mobility

Xu, Yanyan
Çolak, Serdar
Kara, Emre C.
Scott Moura
Marta Gonzalez
2018

The rising adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) leads to the alignment of their electricity and their mobility demands. Therefore, transportation and power infrastructures are becoming increasingly interdependent. In this work, we uncover patterns of PEV mobility by integrating for the first time two unique data sets: (i) mobile phone activity of 1.39 million Bay Area residents and (ii) charging activity of PEVs in 580,000 sessions obtained in the same region. We present a method to estimate individual mobility of PEV drivers at fine temporal and spatial resolution integrating...

Multimicrogrid Load Balancing Through EV Charging Networks

Chen, Xi
Wang, Haihui
Wu, Fan
Wu, Yujie
Marta Gonzalez
Zhang, Junshan
2022

Energy demand and supply vary from area to area, where an unbalanced load may occur and endanger the system security constraints and cause significant differences in the locational marginal price (LMP) in the power system. With the increasing proportion of local renewable energy (RE) sources in microgrids that are connected to the power grid and the growing number of electric vehicle (EV) charging loads, the imbalance will be further magnified. In this article, we first model the EV charging network as a cyber–physical system (CPS) that is coupled with both the transportation networks and...