EVs as Mobile Energy Buffers: Co-Optimizing Energy Systems and Electric Mobility

Abstract

The electrification of mobility is fundamentally reshaping energy demand across urban infrastructure and enterprise operations. Electric vehicles (EVs) are evolving beyond their traditional role as transport assets to become mobile energy buffers, capable of dynamic interaction with buildings, charging infrastructure and the power grid. This talk will present a unified approach to leveraging EVs for cost-effective energy management across two complementary domains: smart buildings and logistics operations. In the first part, the talk will explore multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) frameworks for the joint control of HVAC systems and EVs within buildings. By modeling EVs as stochastic energy buffers, the approach will discuss how to capture the uncertainty in vehicle availability while ensuring thermal comfort and respecting state-of-charge constraints, which enables adaptive load shaping under time-of-day pricing regimes, leading to significant energy cost savings. The second part will focus on enterprise-scale energy optimization, where EV fleet routing is tightly coupled with energy procurement decisions across multiple sources. The talk will discuss hybrid iterative optimization frameworks that integrate approximation techniques for energy sourcing and fleet routing, ensuring scalability across diverse service locations and fleet sizes. Together, these approaches will illustrate how EVs can be orchestrated as intelligent agents within cyber-physical systems for scalable and optimized operations.

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