Smoothening the e-mobility transition in built environments – a user experience perspective
SET master graduation project proposal
The number of electric vehicles (EVs) is rapidly increasing. This also applies to lease fleets at office buildings. Such fleets come with electricity demands – employees want to charge their vehicles, and have sufficient energy charged for their work-home commute at the end of the work day. In order to facilitate that, parking lots install additional EV charging infrastructure. However, typically parking spots with EV chargers are for EVs only.
Currently, the living lab parking lot in Utrecht (see Figure 1) experiences first (social/practical) complications that come with this transition. When recently going from about 150 chargers to about 250 chargers, the number of parking spots available to petrol cars decreased drastically. In order not to have to disconnect chargers, the proposed solution is to distinguish between two categories of parking spots equipped with EV charging infrastructure:
- Green spots: EV-only
- Grey spots: EV and petrol cars welcome
Parking spots without any charging infrastructure remain the same as always – anyone can park their car there. The proposed green/grey categorization comes with a number of questions, combining social and technical perspectives, such as
- From a user experience perspective, how should we distribute those parking spots over the parking lot?
- How to physically distribute grey and green parking spots (e.g., based on cable infrastructure, power limits, closeness to the entrance,…)
- How to effectively introduce, indicate and communicate about grey/green parking spots? (e.g., grey spots to be for petrol cars only if the parking lot is busy otherwise, or for them to be a temporary measure for the next x years?)
- In what way do we expect the parking lot to be utilized?
- .....
In this graduation project, you focus on the impact of the energy transition on large parking lot environments, especially during the transitional phase from petrol cars to EVs. In particular, you will design a decision model and objective function for the grey/green parking spot assignment problem, based on both social factors and physical (power) infrastructure. You have the option to host interviews for your research with employees of the office in Utrecht.
Figure 1 Two-story parking lot at an office building in Utrecht.
Figure 2 Toy example of charging infrastructure for a parking lot,
and possible grey/green parking lot assignment.
For more information, contact the supervisors: Leoni Winschermann (EEMCS), Marco Gerards (EEMCS), Sikke Jansma (BMS)
