Energy Flows - From Electric Vehicle Schedules to Network Flows and Back

Abstract

With the adoption of electric vehicles emerges a need for coordinated charging strategies to cater to the increased and often synchronized energy demand without violating physical infrastructure limits. Common charging strategies repeatedly solve a corresponding offline scheduling problem. In this talk, we start from a real-world use case in Utrecht, and continue to explore how schedules for electric vehicles relate to network flows. We further explore how algorithms that compute optimal schedules for electric vehicle charging actually extend a much larger class of optimization problems. Finally, we circle back to the application, and discuss the interplay between (deterministic) solutions and their application to electric vehicle charging, which comes with uncertainties about user behavior and charging demands.

Bio

Leoni Winschermann is about to complete her PhD at University of Twente. In her work, she applies her mathematical background to problems related to the energy transition, with a special focus on coordinated charging for electric vehicles. The goal is to on the one hand develop provably optimal or (approximately) good algorithms, and on the other hand to validate their performance with real-world data and to take system users (and their concerns/interests) into account.