[agents] Special Issue: Artificial Intelligence to Support the Deployment of Electric Vehicles

[Emmanouil Rigas]

[apologies for cross-posting]

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Artificial Intelligence to Support the Deployment of Electric Vehicles
Research topic in Frontiers in Future Transportation
https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/16657/artificial-intelligence-to-support-the-deployment-of-electric-vehicles
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AIMS AND SCOPE
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Electric Vehicles (EVs) is currently the main pathway to decarbonize  
the transportation sector and significantly reduce CO2 emissions. This  
is crucial when trying to cope with the critically negative effects of  
the climate change. However, to efficiently deploy large volumes of  
EVs and make them attractive to customers, several problems need to be  
tackled:

1. Given the sparse charging infrastructure and the relatively long EV  
charging time, the efficient scheduling of their charging is crucial.  
This is a challenging problem as it must consider the demand and  
constraints of the customers, the availability of the charging  
stations and the constraints of the electricity distribution network.  
Also, to make EVs truly environmentally friendly, the charging must be  
done with energy from intermittent renewable sources. Here, the close  
collaboration of EVs with the Smart Grid is crucial.

2. The EVs have the ability to use their batteries as storage devices  
when being idle. In this way excess energy can be stored for later use  
when demand exists. This Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) mode of operation can  
significantly increase the storage capacity of the network and,  
crucially, increase renewable energy utilization.

3. The EVs can recuperate energy under braking or when driving  
downhill. Thus, energy efficient routing that exploits this EVs’  
ability is important to increase the range and reduce the energy  
demand of the vehicles. This has a positive impact on the environment  
and the charging infrastructure, as the EVs will need to charge less  
often.

4. Emerging modes of transportation, such as the Autonomous Vehicles  
(AV), Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and Mobility-on-Demand  
(MoD), enable different possibilities for the EVs. For example,  
Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) can fine-tune their acceleration  
profile in order to reduce their energy consumption; CAVs may exploit  
macro-level system decisions, e.g., traffic steering, to obtain  
congestion avoidance or collaborative energy-efficient path planning;  
MoD, especially in conjunction with AVs, may exploit complicated  
optimization problems involving the assignment of EVs to customers.

Controlling EVs demands efficient algorithms that can solve problems  
that involve a large number of heterogeneous entities (e.g., EV  
owners), each one having its own goals, needs and incentives (e.g.,  
amount of energy to charge), while they operate in highly dynamic  
environments (e.g., variable number of EVs) and having to deal with a  
number of uncertainties (e.g., future energy demand). Some of these  
challenges can be tackled by powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI)  
techniques. In this Research Topic, we focus on the use of Artificial  
Intelligence techniques to cope with the EV-related challenges. We  
expect research and survey papers in one of the following sectors:

- Charging scheduling- Grid-to-Vehicle
- Dis-charging scheduling- Vehicle-to-Grid
- Renewable energy utilization
- Energy efficient routing
- Customer behavior and incentives provision
- Electronic energy auctions
- Electric vehicles and smart grids
- Electric vehicles and smart metering
- Emerging topics (MoD, Autonomous vehicles, Connected Autonomous Vehicles)

A non-exhaustive list of potential AI techniques to be used is:
- Optimization techniques
- Heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms
- Multi-agent systems
- Electronic auctions
- Mechanism design and game theory
- Machine learning and data analysis
- Internet of Things
- Knowledge representation

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SUBMISSIONS
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Information about the article types can be found here
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/future-transportation#article-types
and information for preparing your manuscript here
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/future-transportation#author-guidelines

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IMPORTANT DATES
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- Deadline for title and abstract registration: January 29, 2021
- Deadline for papers submission: March 30, 2021

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GUEST EDITORS
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Emmanouil Rigas (University of Cyprus)
Christian Vitale (University of Cyprus)
Nick Bassiliades (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Samer Hani Hamdar (George Washington University)