CPS: Small: Collaborative Research: Models and System-Level Coordination Algorithms for Power-in-the-Loop Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems

该项目的目标是研究自动驾驶电动汽车如何按需运送乘客（一种称为自主移动按需或阿莫德的系统），以实现对电力和交通网络的优化耦合控制。关键的观察结果是，阿莫德技术将引起电力和交通网络之间的复杂耦合，即随着人们在城市中移动，充电需求和电价之间的耦合。假设是，通过控制和优化利用这种耦合，阿莫德系统将降低发电成本，提高风能和太阳能等间歇性可再生能源的集成水平，同时提供更方便的运输。该项目的成果将为交通利益相关者和政策制定者提供有关在社会规模上部署自动驾驶汽车的指导方针，通过促进清洁高效的未来交通系统来造福美国经济。 该项目将设计理论模型和优化工具，用于表征上述耦合和在环路中具有电力网络的阿莫德的系统级控制。其关键技术思想是将耦合的电力和交通网络置于流优化的正式框架中，从而将城市地区，充电站和道路抽象为图的节点和边缘，并将客户，车辆和能源的移动抽象为这种图上的流。然后，该项目将设计一个控制框架，以优化决策变量，例如，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The goal of this project is to investigate how self-driving, electric vehicles transporting passengers on demand (a system referred to as autonomous mobility-on-demand, or AMoD) can enable optimized, coupled control of the power and transportation networks. The key observation is that the AMoD technology will give rise to complex couplings between the power and transportation networks, namely couplings between charging demand and electricity prices as people move around a city. The hypothesis is that by exploiting such couplings through control and optimization, AMoD systems will lead to lower electricity generation costs and higher integration levels of intermittent renewable energy resources such as wind and solar, while providing more convenient transportation. The results of this project will provide guidelines to transportation stakeholders and policy-makers regarding the deployment of autonomous vehicles on a societal scale, benefitting the U.S. economy by fostering clean and efficient future transportation systems. This project will devise theoretical models and optimization tools for the characterization of the aforementioned couplings and for the system-level control of AMoD with the power network in the loop. The key technical idea is to cast the coupled power and transportation networks in the formal framework of flow optimization, whereby city districts, charging stations, and roads are abstracted as nodes and edges of a graph, and the movements of customers, vehicles, and energy are abstracted as flows over such a graph. This project will then devise a control framework to optimize over the decision variables, e.g., vehicles' routes, charging decisions, and power generation schedules.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.