Le 09/01/2023 par gicquel :
Bonjour,
Veuillez trouver ci-dessous une offre de stage à l'Université Paris Saclay dans le domaine de la mobilité électrique.
Cordialement,
C. Gicquel
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Context
Car sharing is a concept that allows individuals to borrow cars on a short-term basis from a designated area or parking station, for a rental rate charged by the time or the distance driven. Many car sharing programs, such as ZipCar in London, involve electric vehicles in their car sharing fleets. The development of electric car sharing programs in densely populated cities may have many positive impacts such as a reduced urban congestion, less greenhouse gas emissions and a better air quality.
However, building a successful car sharing program is particularly challenging. It namely requires an adequate planning of the system operations to ensure both customer satisfaction and economic viability of the project. To satisfy potential customers, the car sharing operator should offer trip service joining as many locations as possible at an affordable price and ensure car availability at the right location and the right time.
This internship will focus on strategic long-term design of a one-way station-based electric car sharing network. In such a system, the user is required to drop off the car at one of the stations of the car sharing network but is allowed to return it to a station that may differ from the pickup one. We will thus seek to determine the optimal location and size of the stations, together with the number of vehicles in the fleet. To be practically relevant, these strategic decisions should be made while considering several important operational aspects of the problem such as the spatiotemporal distribution of the demand, the rebalancing of the cars between stations and the charging of cars.
Using a representation as accurate as possible of all the operational aspects related to the management of an electric car sharing network in the strategic design problem ensure that the obtained network, when deployed, has an actual performance close to the expected one. However, the resulting mathematical programming model is likely to be computationally intractable, even for medium-size instances, due to the huge number of variables and constraints involved in the formulation.
Research is thus needed to identify which operational aspects should be modeled with a great level of accuracy in the strategic design problem and which ones can be overlooked or simplified without deteriorating the quality and practical relevancy of the network proposed by the optimization model.
Internship
The main objective of this internship will be to investigate how operational aspects should be considered during the design phase of the system and to provide recommendations about the level of accuracy to be used in the problem modeling. For instance, we would like to determine whether tracking the state-of-charge of each individual vehicle is necessary to determine the right location and size of the stations and the fleet size or whether following vehicle recharging operations at a more aggregate level considering a set of vehicles is sufficient. Similarly, we would like to gain insights about the importance of considering in the problem modeling the weekly and yearly seasonality of the demand and the integration of relocation activities.
The work to be carried out by the student will thus consist in proposing and numerically comparing several alternative mathematical optimization models for this problem.
Keywords
Car sharing system, electric vehicles, facility location, mixed-integer linear programming
Practical information
Environment: The internship will take place at the LISN (Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique) of the Université Paris Saclay (91190 Gif-sur-Yvette). It will be jointly supervised by Dr Céline Gicquel, Associate Professor at the University Paris Saclay, and Mouna Kchacou-Boujelben, Associate Professor at the United Arab Emirates University.
Time and duration: The start of the internship is flexible but should be in Spring 2023. The expected duration is 4 to 6 months.
Profile Candidates: Candidates must be M2 level student (2nd year of MSc or last year of “cycle ingénieur”). They must have a solid background in computer science, good programming skills, and a particular liking for operational research.
Contact: Candidates must send their CV, a letter of motivation and, if available their master marks to Céline Giquel (celine.gicquel_at_lisn.upsaclay.fr) and Mouna Kchaou-Boujelben (mouna.boujelben_at_uaeu.ac.ae).
