Energy

Connected & Autonomous Vehicles – Environmental Impacts – A review

Kopelias, Pantelis
Elissavet, Demiridi
Vogiatzis, Konstantinos
Skabardonis, Alexandros
Zafiropoulou, Vassiliki
2020

Over the last decades the vehicle industry has shown interest in integrating new technologies on vehicles’ design. Such technologies are used in autonomous, connected and electrical vehicles with the primary hope of improving road safety and the environmental impact of road traffic. Regarding the environmental impact, the transport sector has been considered responsible for Greenhouse Gas emissions for the past thirty years or more, and efforts have been made to reduce impacts of such emissions on the environment. The environmental noise is also associated with road traffic and its effects...

Attica Tollway Management in the Athens 2004 Olympic Games

Halkias, Bill
Papandreou, Konstantinos
Kopelias, Pantelis
Prevedouros, Panos D
Skabardonis, Alexander
ITS America
2005

Attica Tollway (Attiki Odos Motorway), the peripheral motorway of Athens metropolitan area, is the first road concession project in Greece. Attica Tollway provides safe and uninterrupted traffic flow conditions, saving more 270,000 person hours of delay per day with substantial savings in fuel consumption and air pollutant emissions. During the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, special traffic management plans were successfully implemented to ensure quick and safe access to the Olympic venues and to maintain a high level of service to all tollway users. The paper presents routine and emergency...

Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways, (STEPs) [Project]

Skabardonis, Alexander
2007

Need to develop theory, tools, and methods that allow for self-consistent and transparent comparisons of promising alternative energy and vehicle pathways (hydrogen, biofuels, electricity, and fossil fuels). Also, to inform the public debate and to assist our public and private sponsors on sustainable transportation alternatives.

A Network Spatial Analysis Simulating Response Time to Calls for Service at Variable Staffing Levels

Clark, Callie
Dangwal, Chitra
Kato, Dylan
Gonzalez, Marta
2022

In light of recent events, there has been a surge in discussions of defunding police. On one hand, policy that reduces police presence aims to reduce frequency of police violence. On the other hand, downsizing the police force triggers concerns of public safety and police response time. In this work, we use spatial analysis to examine the impact a reduced police force may have on response time. Modeling the transportation system of Chicago as a network, we simulate the response of police officers from stations to incidents. We then use this simulation to calculate the impacts of resource...

How Does the Electricity Demand Profile Impact the Attractiveness of PV-Coupled Battery Systems Combining Applications?

Pena-Bello, Alejandro
Barbour, Edward
Gonzalez, Marta C.
Yilmaz, Selin
Patel, Martin K.
Parra, David
2020

Energy storage is a key solution to supply renewable electricity on demand and in particular batteries are becoming attractive for consumers who install PV panels. In order to minimize their electricity bill and keep the grid stable, batteries can combine applications. The daily match between PV supply and the electricity load profile is often considered as a determinant for the attractiveness of residential PV-coupled battery systems, however, the previous literature has so far mainly focused on the annual energy balance. In this paper, we analyze the techno-economic impact of adding a...

Multimicrogrid Load Balancing Through EV Charging Networks

Chen, Xi
Wang, Haihui
Wu, Fan
Wu, Yujie
González, Marta C.
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...

The Dark Side of the Earth: Benchmarking Lighting Access for All Cities on Earth and the CityNet dataset

Albert, Adrian
Strano, Emanuele
Kaur, Jasleen
Gonzalez, Marta
2021

In this paper, we present an analysis of urban form, defined as the spatial distribution of macroeconomic quantities that characterize a city such as population, built environmentBuilt environment, and energy useEnergy use. In particular, we develop a framework to study the question of “mismatch” between the spatial distribution of lighting levels observed in a city (which was previously shown to be a proxy for energy access and wealth levels) and that city’s population density and built area distribution. This allows us to rank cities globally by their ability to, intuitively, “match...

Joint Price and Power Optimization Experiment for Workplace Charging Stations

Ozturk, Ayse Tugba
Obeid, Hassan
Zeng, Teng
Zeng, Wente
Moura, Scott J.
2025

Workplace electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is a key enabler of sustainable urban transitions—by facilitating daytime charging aligned with renewable energy and expanding access for drivers without home-charging options. However, financial sustainability remains challenging as these services are often provided for free or at flat rates. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of joint price and power optimization in increasing revenue and shifting load at workplace charging stations. We integrate empirically estimated behavioral models to influence user decisions through...

Two-Stage Mechanism Design for Electric Vehicle Charging with Day-Ahead Reservations

Su, Pan-Yang
Ju, Yi
Moura, Scott
Sastry, Shankar
2025

We propose a general two-period model where electrical vehicles (EVs) can reserve charging sessions in the day-ahead market and swap them in the real-time market. Under the model, we explore several candidate mechanisms for running the two markets, compared using several normative properties such as incentive compatibility, efficiency, reservation awareness, and budget balance. Specifically, reservation awareness is the only property coupling the two markets and dictates that an EV will not get a lower utility by joining the real-time market. Focusing on the real-time market, we show that...

Optimization of Electric Vehicle Evacuation Integrating Mobile Charging Stations and Considering Vehicle Diversity

Tang, Xuchang
Kuang, Simon
Lin, Xinfan
Feng, Shuang
de Castro, Ricardo
Gan, Qijian
Moura, Scott
2025

This paper addresses the challenges of electric vehicles (EVs) long-distance mass evacuations, particularly those posed by the extended charging time. We focus on optimizing evacuation planning in high EV ownership areas by considering route selection, vehicle grouping, departure timing, and charging scheduling, while incorporating Mobile Charging Stations (MCS) to supplement the existing Fixed Charging Stations (FCS). A two-stage optimization approach is used, i.e. route optimization through a recursive Dijkstra algorithm, followed by vehicle scheduling and MCS deployment via Mixed...