Topic:Infrastructure Design for Electric Vehicles
Speaker:Prof. Zuo-Jun (Max) Shen,Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California-Berkeley
Time: 2:00-3:30pm,Aug 5,2011
Venue: F210 Mechanical Building A

Abstract：
We will discuss an infrastructure design problem for electric vehicles (EVs). A key obstacle to infrastructure planning for EVs comes from the long recharging time that makes it difficult to "refuel" the vehicle in the middle of a long trip. To address this problem, some have advocated that an EV infrastructure network should include swapping stations, at which EVs may exchange their empty batteries for full ones in the middle of long trips, in addition to charging adaptors at homes, work places and shopping malls. This solution allows EVs to be effectively "refueled" in only 1-2 minutes instead of hours.  Since the adoption rate of electric vehicles, and thus demand for swapping service, is still highly uncertain, we model the swapping station network design problem within a robust optimization framework. The objective is to minimize the cost of servicing customers while maintaining a certain service requirements. We demonstrate how to tightly bound this integrated network design problem by a mixed-integer second-order cone programming problem. Finally, we discuss some computational results using data from the San Francisco Bay Area freeway network.

About the speaker：
Prof. Zuo-Jun (Max) Shen is Chancellor's Professor at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He has been active in the following research areas: integrated supply chain design and management, market mechanism design, applied optimization, and decision making with limited information. He has published 3 books and 83 papers in these field, attended more than 30 academic conferences and been the cluster chair of academic conferences for 7 times.  He is currently on the editorial/advisory board for several leading journals. He received the CAREER award from National Science Foundation in 2003-2010. He is the Professor of the Year in IEOR of UC Berkeley in 2010.