Shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles and the Power Grid: Applications and Research Challenges

The future of transportation will be shared, autonomous, and electric, leading to a paradigm shift in the transportation domain. This shift comes with opportunities and challenges for the electric power system. For example, the charging of large shared autonomous electric vehicle fleets can be controlled in a centralized way and these vehicles can also provide ancillary services such as demand response or frequency regulation for the electric power system. In this paper, we give an overview of the research residing on this boundary between transportation systems and electric power systems. We discuss shortcomings and identify potential topics of research that we believe need to be addressed to foster the successful integration of shared electric vehicle fleets into the power system.