Summer semester 2010- Winter semester 2010/11

Let's imagine the following scenario:

Oldenburg, 20.02.2020: Electric vehicles have now become an attractive alternative. The optimal use of their batteries is no longer a problem in normal everyday life thanks to charging stations in long-term car parks. Only the reliable supply on long journeys remains a problem.

Such a vehicle battery has a range of around 200 kilometres and charging takes several hours, so electric cars are dependent on exchange stations where they can swap their discharged batteries for charged ones.

The following questions need to be answered when setting up such a network of exchange stations:

• Where should the exchange stations be optimally located? For cost reasons, it is not possible to set up an exchange station at every petrol station during the set-up phase.
  
• How many batteries should an exchange station be equipped with so that it can always fulfil the (daily and seasonal) fluctuating demand?
• Overproduction of renewable energy, i.e. mostly wind energy, should be used to charge the batteries wherever possible. However, these are only available depending on weather conditions. How does this affect the stockpiling of (charged) batteries at the exchange stations?
• Interchange stations can thus be seen as energy storage facilities: Optimising the discharge of the batteries there that are not needed could bridge energy bottlenecks and thus reduce the need for expensive, CO₂-emitting control power plants.
  
• What would be the effect of planning journeys and routing vehicles depending on the changeover stations? A navigation device could, for example, reserve batteries at suitable exchange stations at the same time as calculating the route.
  

The eMobility project group aims to tackle these problems, which we will face as the number of electric vehicles increases.

• Development of a software system to solve the optimisation problems
• Optimal choice of locations
• Optimal quantity of stored batteries
• Optimal routing of the vehicles
  
• Creation of a demonstrator to visualise the results
• The exact requirements for the software system to be developed and realised within one year will be defined by the project group together with the supervisors.
• The technical basis for the realisation should also be discussed and determined by the project group itself, i.e.
• the programming language to be used
• Software design procedure
• Simulation engine, if applicable
• Selection of optimisation algorithms and tools for their implementation
• Tools for visualisation
  

The project group therefore offers interesting questions for all students of Computing Science or Business Informatics degree programmes:
From the field of Business Informatics, questions of logistics and warehousing are addressed; for Computing Science students, there are the challenges of solving a non-trivial, future-oriented problem as well as creating an interesting and appropriate graphical visualisation and user interface.
You will also learn about unconventional optimisation methods such as Ant Colony Optimisation or Genetic Algorithms and how to select and use suitable frameworks.
Previous knowledge of environmental informatics is not required.

The results of the project group should be able to be used as a demonstrator at trade fairs using the visualisation to be developed. A presentation at EnviroInfo or similar may be possible. Participation in the Students Prize competition, which last year was honoured with €300, €600 and €1200 in prize money, is also a regular option. The first prize has already been awarded once to a PG from our department, maybe you can do the same!

Following the project group, there is also the opportunity to write a thesis on this or a similarly interesting topic in our department.

One of the social events is definitely the traditional Environmental Informatics barbecue in the summer.