Research Projects

Considering that seamless transport of goods and people is a lifeline for a country's growth, and that the transport sector is a major contributor to carbon emissions, there is a focus to develop sustainable transport solutions for India's mobility sector. Electric Vehicles (EV) are likely to contribute significantly towards this vision. The significantly increasing number of EVs shall consequently increase the demand for electricity for charging EVs. The growing energy demand for charging will burden existing electricity supply and distribution system infrastructure, all the more during high charging requirement hours. The situation is likely to aggravate with wider adoption of rapid charging mode, when EV owners would like to charge fast within a shorter time span. Public rapid charging stations charging will face unordered and uncertain fast-charging requirements in high traffic areas. Coordinated charging of EVs can alleviate the loads on power networks. However, focusing only on the loading issues of distribution systems, without considering the transportation network may lead to traffic congestion, and loss of traveler time. Existing research and industry practices focus on these issues in isolation, thus providing sub-optimal charging and travel solutions. This inefficiency can be mitigated by integrating the traffic flow with coordinated charging of EVs, thus co-optimising the EV owners' optimal travel time objective with optimal charging solutions of charging station owners. Such global optimisation solutions can mitigate the pitfalls of locally optimal solutions of EV owner time and locations of installing fast-charging stations, thus providing sustainable, efficient and optimal solutions for all stakeholders. The proposed project provides long term solutions to EV charging challenges considering the interests of EV as well as charging stations owners while avoiding DT overloading. The proposed project provides a platform for 1) local sharing of the allocated charging quota among neighbouring public charging stations by peer to peer (P2P) trading to match the real time charging demand and 2) EV navigation solutions to travellers with fast charging requirements. These P2P transactions decide the prices offered by each charging station based on their cost of the revised allocated quota. The project aims to facilitate EV navigation in real time by providing info like the nearest charging station available at minimal cost while considering factors like charging time, distance to the charging station, shortest traffic route to help the user to decide the shortest time to cover the route at minimal cost. Considering the importance of transparency to prevent collusion in P2P trading and keeping user privacy to prevent tracking of EV owners, the proposed platform will be based on Ethereum BlockChain. This will ease adoption of the developed platform for practical use by building a strong mutual trust between all involved parties.