Electric Vehicles

Charging infrastructure availability is a major concern for plug-in electric vehicle users. Nowadays, the limited public chargers are commonly occupied by vehicles which have already been fully charged. Such phenomenon, known as overstay, hinders other vehicles’ accessibility to charging resources. In this paper, we analyze a charging facility innovation to tackle the challenge of overstay, leveraging the idea of Robo-chargers - automated chargers that can rotate in a charging station and proactively plug or unplug plug-in electric vehicles. We formalize an operation model for stations...

Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are ideal for electrification of off-road heavy-duty vehicles with less concerns on the system weight. However, the limited battery life aggravated by the long working hours is a primary concern for some of-road applications such as construction equipment. Temperature is one of the main influencing factors in battery aging. Therefore, accurate prediction of temperature dynamics with fast lumped parameter models is essential and can be used for long-term analysis. This paper introduces a thermal model for pack of cells, with each cell represented by...

This article presents an end-to-end framework for safe learning-based control (LbC) using nonlinear stochastic MPC and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). This work is motivated by several open challenges in LbC literature. Many control-theoretic LbC methods require subject matter expertise (SME), often manifested as preexisting data of safe trajectories or structural model knowledge, to translate their own safety guarantees. In this article, we focus on LbC where the controller is applied directly to a system of which it has no or extremely limited direct experience, toward safety...

This special section features extended versions of papers originally published in the 2022 IEEE Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference (VPPC22), hosted by the University of California, Merced, USA. This was the first time that the VPPC took place in California, USA. It was a timely visit. California recently announced that only zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) will be allowed to be sold in the state by 2035. Other states and countries will surely follow. The VPPC, as one of the pioneer forums dedicated to electric mobility, is in a privileged position to create and disseminate knowledge that...