Electrified transportation: a collaborative, data-driven approach for a smart city

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Smart cities are at the core of the emerging urban mobility transformation paradigm, where heterogeneous network infrastructure, ubiquitous sensor devices, big-data processing, and intelligent control frameworks are all used to help improve the population's quality of life by providing adapted services. Big-data analytics and operations research are important in delivering these intelligent services to citizens. In this project, we study and propose an electrified transportation system design, including power stations for electric taxis and shared cars and network design for parking lots and charging stations for ride-sharing. The efficient use of the power system is the critical concern of this study.First, we study the location problem for electric taxis and ride-sharing charging stations based on the spatiotemporal demands for battery swapping. We formulate the location planning and capacity allocation of electric taxis and ride-sharing battery swapping stations as a large-scale mixed-integer optimization, whose goal is to minimize the operating costs, subject to the constraint of meeting the drivers' demand. Efficient heuristics will be proposed to solve this optimization problem. The solutions will be studied to provide insight for developing road usage policies, space allocation, and new network design decisions.Second, we investigate the optimal location and capacity for shared car parking spaces and charging stations under uncertain (stochastic) demands. Our goal is to reduce carpooling companies' operating costs while meeting travellers' needs. Sharing mechanisms of parking spaces and charging stations will also be investigated to improve social welfare.The large energy requirements of these systems are the focus of the third aspect of this project. Given the availability of batteries to charge and/or swap, it is necessary to determine when to charge them. With a large number of batteries to be charged, this can place stress on the power grid. The fact that batteries can provide power to the grid can be used as a mitigation mechanism during peak electricity consumption periods, as is often the case in Quebec and Ontario. They are highly distributed, close to consumption points, do not stress the generation system, which could be operating near its limit, and do not impose usage limits on consumers.By investigating these three modules, we design optimal strategies for the exploitation of transportation systems that can be applied to other cities.