Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Transportation is believed to be responsible for up to a quarter of Canada's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, the electrification of road vehicles seems like an unavoidable stop in the country's path to attain its COP21 engagements. Despite the government's efforts to lower the entry barriers and improve the business case for electric vehicles (EVs), their adoption in logistics and public transit systems is still quite limited. One of the main reasons is that replacing internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) by EVs forces companies and transit authorities to rethink how their systems are designed and operated. This research program aims at designing, implementing, testing and disseminating mathematical models and optimization algorithms to support companies and authorities in this transformation. The program is structured around two long term research objectives. The first objective is to develop optimization-based tools to solve fleet transition problems. These problems consists in establishing a plan (usually spanning several years) to replace ICEVs by EVs taking into account factors such as the purchase costs of EVs, the salvage revenues from ICEVs, the operating costs of both types of vehicles, and the costs of charging infrastructure. In other words, these tools tell the decision makers the number and types of EVs and chargers to buy each year until the fleet transformation is completed. The program includes two projects contributing to this objective. The first focuses on applications in which the future tasks of the vehicles are relatively well known or predictable (e.g., urban buses). Oppositely, the second focuses on applications in which the future tasks are unknown (e.g., car share systems). The second long term objective is to develop optimization methods to solve electric vehicle routing, rostering, and charging scheduling problems. These are operational day-to-day problems concerned with the assignment of EVs to tasks and the scheduling of the charging operations needed to complete these tasks. The program includes three projects contributing to this objective. The first focuses on developing algorithms to build multi-day charging schedules for fleets of electric buses; the second on creating algorithms to build over-night charging schedules + next-day routes for fleets of delivery and service vehicles; and the third on conceiving methods to control the interactions between EVs and a smart electricity grid during over-night home charging operations. This research will provide Canadian companies and transit agencies with a powerful toolkit to i) support their transition towards fleets of EVs and ii) to operate these vehicles on a daily basis. We expect this toolkit to help lowering the barriers to adopt EVs, thus helping the country to reduce its GHG emissions and to accelerate its transformation into a carbon neutral nation.