Overview: Convergent Research

The overarching goal of the ASPIRE ERC across its ten years of NSF support is to propel society to the tipping point in the proposed transformations across the automotive, transportation and electric utility industries.

The envisioned system of systems is a ubiquitous charging experience through wireless and wired charging solutions seamlessly integrated into transportation systems and dynamically optimized among electric utility and vehicle networks.

The holy grail of long-term goals is for any and all users or vehicles throughout the system to be able to submit requests to get from A to B, and have the system provide guaranteed solutions that are optimized for cost and environmental impact (including environmental justice).

Behind the scenes would be a suite of commercially available, cost-effective charging hardware and systems technologies, coordinated transportation and electric utility infrastructure planning models, and policies and public-private-partnerships that supported years of development to predict user needs and make the solutions available and desirable for the wide range of user groups, from individuals to large fleets, from passenger vehicles to heavy duty trucks. Also there would be near-term planning and real-time algorithms running scenarios and predicting needs and solutions on the electric utility and transportation routing systems and providing timing and pricing signals and incentives to maximize utilization of the infrastructure and minimize the negative impacts on users.

This is closer than you might think.