Project Description:

The recent technological and commercial boom in electric vehicles (EVs) and related technologies such as fast charging and wireless charging have created the potential for an energy-transportation nexus that can contribute to decreased carbon emissions in both sectors. On the other hand, such interdependencies, if not designed adequately, may negatively impact the robustness and resilience of the networks, both at the grid infrastructure level and at the electricity market level. Analyzing and addressing these impacts will require a multidisciplinary research effort involving models, tools, and techniques from power systems, transportation networks, control, optimization, and machine learning.

In this context, we are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to work on a highly interdisciplinary project at the interface of power systems, electricity markets, and transportation networks, involving (i) joint modeling and analysis of the electric grid, electricity markets, and the transportation network to analyze the impact of EV integration and novel charging technologies such as wireless charging, and (ii) designing control actions and market mechanisms to ensure safe and reliable operation at the transportation-energy nexus.

Start Date:

May 2023

Postdoc Qualifications:

Ideal candidates will have a strong background/interest in interdisciplinary research involving one or more of the following areas: control, optimization, market design, machine learning, and data analytics, as applied to power systems and the energy-transportation nexus.

Co-Advisors:

Sivaranjani Seetharaman, School of Industrial Engineering; Email: sseetha@purdue.edu; Website: https://sivaranjanis.com/

Junjie Qin, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Email: jq@purdue.edu; Website: https://engineering.purdue.edu/people/junjie.qin.1

Dionysios Aliprantis, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Email: dionysis@purdue.edu; Website: https://engineering.purdue.edu/~dionysis/

Bibliography:

El Helou, R., Sivaranjani, S., Kalathil, D., Schaper, A., & Xie, L. “The impact of heavy-duty vehicle electrification on large power grids: A synthetic Texas case study.” Advances in Applied Energy, 6 (2022).

Junjie Qin, Kameshwar Poolla, and Pravin Varaiya, “Mobile storage for demand charge reduction,” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, forthcoming, 2021.

Junjie Qin, Jared Porter, Kameshwar Poolla, and Pravin Varaiya, “Piggyback on TNCs for electricity service: Spatial pricing and synergetic value,” in Proc. American Control Conference (ACC), 2020.

Haddad, D., Konstantinou, T., Prasad, A., Hua, Z., Aliprantis, D., Gkritza, K., & Pekarek, S. Data-driven design and assessment of dynamic wireless charging systems. In 2019 IEEE PELS Workshop on Emerging Technologies: Wireless Power Transfer (WoW) (pp. 59-64). IEEE.