arXiv subjects

Scott Moura

Publications and source records attributed to Scott Moura.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Regulating EV Charging Markets for Fairness: Incentives for Pricing and Capacity Decisions

The transition to electric mobility calls for charging infrastructure that is both efficient and socially equitable. This paper examines fairness in electric vehicle (EV) charging station pricing and capacity through a game-theoretic perspective. We model a non-cooperative market in which competing charging service providers set prices and capacities while customers choose stations based on generalized cost, leading to a market equilibrium. We then benchmark this decentralized outcome against an idealized planner solution that jointly optimizes efficiency and equity. To align market outcomes with socially desirable goals, we design targeted incentives that guide operators toward more fair charger placement. Case studies demonstrate that unregulated competition tends to exacerbate disparities in charger access across demographic groups, whereas carefully calibrated incentives can reduce inequities without significant efficiency loss. The framework provides insights for policymakers on reconciling free-market dynamics with the broader societal goals of fairness in electrified mobility systems.

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arXiv2026

CAR-EnKF: A Covariance-Adaptive and Recalibrated Ensemble Kalman Filter Framework

The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is widely used for nonlinear and high-dimensional state estimation because it replaces complex covariance propagation with simple ensemble statistics. However, conventional EnKF implementations can become overconfident in the presence of measurement nonlinearity. The commonly used covariance inflation technique only partially alleviates this issue. This paper proposes a covariance-adaptive and recalibrated ensemble Kalman filter (CAR-EnKF) framework for nonlinear state estimation. The framework introduces two improvements that are only active for nonlinear measurements and reduce to the conventional EnKF framework without covariance inflation in the linear case: (i) a recalibration mechanism that reassesses the effect of the chosen Kalman gain after updating the ensemble mean, and (ii) a positive semidefinite covariance compensation term that accounts for measurement nonlinearity. An adaptive update law based on the normalized innovation squared further tunes the compensation magnitude online. The framework is algorithmically general and is specialized here to the stochastic EnKF and the ensemble transform Kalman filter (ETKF). Experiments on feature-based SLAM and the Lorenz--96 system show that CAR-EnKF consistently reduces RMSE relative to conventional EnKF baselines, with especially large improvements at low measurement-noise levels. The related codes are available at \href{https://github.com/Shida-Jiang/CAR-EnKF-A-Covariance-Adaptive-and-Recalibrated-Ensemble-Kalman-Filter-Framework}

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arXiv2026

Scalable Optimization for Mobility-Aware Coordinated Electric Vehicle Charging in Distribution Power Networks

Rapid growth in electric-vehicle (EV) charging demand is placing increasing stress on power distribution networks (PDNs), whose hosting capacity is often limited and spatially uneven. Beyond demonstrating that coordination can help, this paper answers an open question that is central for planners: What is the maximal achievable benefit of EV charging demand flexibility from spatial and temporal shifting in reducing overload-driven distribution upgrades at a regional scale? We introduce MAC (Mobility-Aware Coordinated EV charging) to establish a credible upper bound, which entails rethinking charging flexibility around individual mobility, fusing travel itineraries with feeder-level hosting-capacity data, and solving population-scale optimization with spatio-temporal coupling to certified near-optimality. (i) MAC expands feasible scheduling by coupling charging decisions over the full mobility horizon. Instead of enforcing per-session energy recovery, it only requires the EV state-of-charge (SOC) to remain sufficient for upcoming trips. (ii) MAC is computationally scalable via an iterated price response (IPR) scheme. Each iteration posts a locational-temporal price, collects the fleet's best responses in parallel, and updates the price from the observed capacity shortage. Custom batched subproblem solvers remove the per-iteration bottleneck of solving millions of best responses. In a future-oriented 30% EV adoption scenario for the San Francisco Bay Area, MAC almost eliminates overload-driven upgrade needs relative to unmanaged charging. Comparing across the baseline spectrum, mobility-aware flexibility alone removes most of the overload, outperforming even fully coordinated session-based charging, and coordination on top suppresses most of the remainder. Both levers are thus essential, and the resulting best-case benchmarks provide references for PDN planning and operations.

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arXiv2026

Model-Agnostic Energy Throughput Control for Range and Lifetime Extension of Electric Vehicles via Cell-Level Inverters

A conventional electric vehicle (EV) powertrain relies on a centralized high-voltage DC-AC inverter, thereby limiting cell-level control and potentially reducing overall driving range and battery lifetime. This paper studies an H-bridge-based cell-level inverter topology that performs power conversion at the cell level, enabling independent control of individual cells and expanding the design space for battery management. Leveraging these additional degrees of freedom, we propose a model-agnostic energy-throughput control strategy that extends EV range while improving battery-pack lifetime. Because usable energy (and thus driving range) and lifetime are governed by the cells with the lowest state-of-charge (SOC) and state-of-health (SOH), respectively, the proposed controller preferentially routes energy throughput to healthier cells. Specifically, during charging, it permits cell SOCs to diverge to promote SOH equalization; during discharging, it rebalances SOC to maximize usable capacity under per-cell constraints. The proposed SOC-SOH-aware control strategy is evaluated on two aging models representing lithium manganese oxide and lithium iron phosphate chemistries, using a Tesla Model 3 charge-discharge profile across 14 different parameter settings. Simulations show a 7-38% improvement in lifetime relative to a conventional SOC-only balancing baseline. More broadly, the results suggest a software-defined pathway to extend EV pack life through routine charging, with minimal reliance on specific degradation models or discharge profiles.

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arXiv2026

Design Guidelines for Nonlinear Kalman Filters via Covariance Compensation

Nonlinear extensions of the Kalman filter (KF), such as the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), are indispensable for state estimation in complex dynamical systems, yet the conditions for a nonlinear KF to provide robust and accurate estimations remain poorly understood. This work proposes a theoretical framework that identifies the causes of failure and success in certain nonlinear KFs and establishes guidelines for their improvement. Central to our framework is the concept of covariance compensation: the deviation between the covariance predicted by a nonlinear KF and that of the EKF. With this definition and detailed theoretical analysis, we derive three design guidelines for nonlinear KFs: (i) invariance under orthogonal transformations, (ii) sufficient covariance compensation beyond the EKF baseline, and (iii) selection of compensation magnitude that favors underconfidence. Both theoretical analysis and empirical validation confirm that adherence to these principles significantly improves estimation accuracy, whereas fixed parameter choices commonly adopted in the literature are often suboptimal. The codes and the proofs for all the theorems in this paper are available at https://github.com/Shida-Jiang/Guidelines-for-Nonlinear-Kalman-Filters.

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arXiv2025

Energy Efficient Nonlinear Microscopic Dynamical Model for Autonomous and Electric Vehicles

This article proposes a nonlinear microscopic dynamical model for autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs) that considers battery energy efficiency in the car-following dynamics. The model builds upon the Optimal Velocity Model (OVM), with the control term based on the battery dynamics to enable thermally optimal and energy-efficient driving. We rigorously prove that the proposed model achieves lower energy consumption compared to the Optimal Velocity Follow-the-Leader (OVFL) model. Through numerical simulations, we validate the analytical results on the energy efficiency. We additionally investigate the stability properties of the proposed model.

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arXiv2025

Two-Stage Mechanism Design for Electric Vehicle Charging with Day-Ahead Reservations

We propose a general two-period model where electrical vehicles (EVs) can reserve charging sessions in the day-ahead market and swap them in the real-time market. Under the model, we explore several candidate mechanisms for running the two markets, compared using several normative properties such as incentive compatibility, efficiency, reservation awareness, and budget balance. Specifically, reservation awareness is the only property coupling the two markets and dictates that an EV will not get a lower utility by joining the real-time market. Focusing on the real-time market, we show that two variants of the classical Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism do not satisfy all the proposed properties; specifically, one is not reservation-aware, while the other is not budget-balanced. Moreover, we show that no mechanism satisfies some combinations of the properties. Then, we propose to use a posted-price mechanism to resolve the issue, which turns out to be the dynamic pricing mechanism adopted in many real-world systems. The proposed mechanism has no efficiency guarantee but satisfies all the other properties. To improve efficiency, we propose to use a VCG auction in the day-ahead market that guides the reserve prices in the real-time market. When EVs' valuations in the two markets are highly correlated, the proposed approach results in highly efficient outcomes.

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arXiv2025

Joint Price and Power MPC for Peak Power Reduction at Workplace EV Charging Stations

Demand charge, a utility fee based on an electricity customer's peak power consumption, often constitutes a significant portion of costs for commercial electric vehicle (EV) charging station operators. This paper explores control methods to reduce peak power consumption at workplace EV charging stations in a joint price and power optimization framework. We optimize a menu of price options to incentivize users to select controllable charging service. Using this framework, we propose a model predictive control approach to reduce both demand charge and overall operator costs. Through a Monte Carlo simulation, we find that our algorithm outperforms a state-of-the-art benchmark optimization strategy and can significantly reduce station operator costs.

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arXiv2025

An Adaptive Estimation Approach based on Fisher Information to Overcome the Challenges of LFP Battery SOC Estimation

Robust and Real-time State of Charge (SOC) estimation is essential for Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries, which are widely used in electric vehicles (EVs) and energy storage systems due to safety and longevity. However, the flat Open Circuit Voltage (OCV)-SOC curve makes this task particularly challenging. This challenge is complicated by hysteresis effects, and real-world conditions such as current bias, voltage quantization errors, and temperature that must be considered in the battery management system use. In this paper, we proposed an adaptive estimation approach to overcome the challenges of LFPSOC estimation. Specifically, the method uses an adaptive fisher information fusion strategy that adaptively combines the SOC estimation from two different models, which are Coulomb counting and equivalent circuit model-based parameter identification. The effectiveness of this strategy is rationalized by the information richness excited by external cycling signals. A 3D OCV-H-SOC map that captures the relationship between OCV, hysteresis, and SOC was proposed as the backbone, and can be generalizable to other widely adopted parameter-identification methods. Extensive validation under ideal and real-world use scenarios, including SOC-OCV flat zones, current bias, voltage quantization errors, low temperatures, and insufficient current excitations, have been performed using 4 driving profiles, i.e., the Orange County Transit Bus Cycle, the California Unified Cycle, the US06 Drive Cycle, and the New York City Cycle, where the results demonstrate superiority over the state-of-the-art unscented Kalman filter, long short-term memory networks and transformer in all validation cases.

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arXiv2025

Energy-Aware Lane Planning for Connected Electric Vehicles in Urban Traffic: Design and Vehicle-in-the-Loop Validation

Urban driving with connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) offers potential for energy savings, yet most eco-driving strategies focus solely on longitudinal speed control within a single lane. This neglects the significant impact of lateral decisions, such as lane changes, on overall energy efficiency, especially in environments with traffic signals and heterogeneous traffic flow. To address this gap, we propose a novel energy-aware motion planning framework that jointly optimizes longitudinal speed and lateral lane-change decisions using vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. Our approach estimates long-term energy costs using a graph-based approximation and solves short-horizon optimal control problems under traffic constraints. Using a data-driven energy model calibrated to an actual battery electric vehicle, we demonstrate with vehicle-in-the-loop experiments that our method reduces motion energy consumption by up to 24 percent compared to a human driver, highlighting the potential of connectivity-enabled planning for sustainable urban autonomy.

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arXiv2025

Electrifying Heavy-Duty Trucks: Battery-Swapping vs Fast Charging

The advantages and disadvantages of Battery Swapping Stations (BSS) for heavy-duty trucks are poorly understood, relative to Fast Charging Stations (FCS) systems. This study evaluates these two charging mechanisms for electric heavy-duty trucks, aiming to compare the systems' efficiency and identify their optimal design. A model was developed to address the planning and operation of BSS in a charging network, considering in-station batteries as assets for various services. We assess performance metrics including transportation efficiency and battery utilization efficiency. Our evaluation reveals that BSS significantly increased transportation efficiency by reducing vehicle downtime compared to fast charging, but may require more batteries. BSS with medium-sized batteries offers improved transportation efficiency in terms of time and labor. FCS-reliant trucks require larger batteries to compensate for extended charging times. To understand the trade-off between these two metrics, a cost-benefit analysis was performed under different scenarios involving potential shifts in battery prices and labor costs. Additionally, BSS shows potential for significant $\text{CO}_2$ emission reductions and increased profitability through energy arbitrage and grid ancillary services. These findings emphasize the importance of integrating BSS into future electric truck charging networks and adopting carbon-aware operational frameworks.

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arXiv2025

Physics-Aware Robotic Palletization with Online Masking Inference

The efficient planning of stacking boxes, especially in the online setting where the sequence of item arrivals is unpredictable, remains a critical challenge in modern warehouse and logistics management. Existing solutions often address box size variations, but overlook their intrinsic and physical properties, such as density and rigidity, which are crucial for real-world applications. We use reinforcement learning (RL) to solve this problem by employing action space masking to direct the RL policy toward valid actions. Unlike previous methods that rely on heuristic stability assessments which are difficult to assess in physical scenarios, our framework utilizes online learning to dynamically train the action space mask, eliminating the need for manual heuristic design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, we deploy our learned task planner in a real-world robotic palletizer, validating its practical applicability in operational settings.

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arXiv2024

Relax, Estimate, and Track: a Simple Battery State-of-charge and State-of-health Estimation Method

Battery management is a critical component of ubiquitous battery-powered energy systems, in which battery state-of-charge (SOC) and state-of-health (SOH) estimations are of crucial importance. Conventional SOC and SOH estimation methods, especially model-based methods, often lack accurate modeling of the open circuit voltage (OCV), have relatively high computational complexity, and lack theoretical analysis. This study introduces a simple SOC and SOH estimation method that overcomes all these weaknesses. The key idea of the proposed method is to momentarily set the cell's current to zero for a few minutes during the charging, perform SOC and SOH estimation based on the measured data, and continue tracking the cell's SOC afterward. The method is based on rigorous theoretical analysis, requires no hyperparameter fine-tuning, and is hundreds of times faster than conventional model-based methods. The method is validated on six batteries charged at different C rates and temperatures, realizing fast and accurate estimations under various conditions, with a SOH root mean square error (RMSE) of around 3% and a SOC RMSE of around 1.5%. The data and codes are available at https://berkeley.box.com/s/jz1w6po2iqzzfy7irxd9ok47ku3tr86j.

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arXiv2024

Mitigating Overconfidence in Nonlinear Kalman Filters via Covariance Recalibration

The Kalman filter (KF) is an optimal linear state estimator for linear systems, and numerous extensions, including the extended Kalman filter (EKF), unscented Kalman filter (UKF), and cubature Kalman filter (CKF), have been developed for nonlinear systems. Although these nonlinear KFs differ in how they approximate nonlinear transformations, they all retain the same update framework as the linear KF. In this paper, we show that, under nonlinear measurements, this conventional framework inherently tends to underestimate the true posterior covariance, leading to overconfident covariance estimates. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to provide a mathematical proof of this systematic covariance underestimation in a general nonlinear KF framework. Motivated by this analysis, we propose a covariance-recalibrated framework that re-approximates the measurement model after the state update to better capture the actual effect of the Kalman gain on the posterior covariance; when recalibration indicates that an update is harmful, the update can be withdrawn. The proposed framework can be combined with essentially any existing nonlinear KF, and simulations across four nonlinear KFs and five applications show that it substantially improves both state and covariance estimation accuracy, often reducing errors by several orders of magnitude. The code and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/Shida-Jiang/A-new-framework-for-nonlinear-Kalman-filters.

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arXiv2024

Remaining Discharge Energy Prediction for Lithium-Ion Batteries Over Broad Current Ranges: A Machine Learning Approach

Lithium-ion batteries have found their way into myriad sectors of industry to drive electrification, decarbonization, and sustainability. A crucial aspect in ensuring their safe and optimal performance is monitoring their energy levels. In this paper, we present the first study on predicting the remaining energy of a battery cell undergoing discharge over wide current ranges from low to high C-rates. The complexity of the challenge arises from the cell's C-rate-dependent energy availability as well as its intricate electro-thermal dynamics especially at high C-rates. To address this, we introduce a new definition of remaining discharge energy and then undertake a systematic effort in harnessing the power of machine learning to enable its prediction. Our effort includes two parts in cascade. First, we develop an accurate dynamic model based on integration of physics with machine learning to capture a battery's voltage and temperature behaviors. Second, based on the model, we propose a machine learning approach to predict the remaining discharge energy under arbitrary C-rates and pre-specified cut-off limits in voltage and temperature. The experimental validation shows that the proposed approach can predict the remaining discharge energy with a relative error of less than 3% when the current varies between 0~8 C for an NCA cell and 0~15 C for an LFP cell. The approach, by design, is amenable to training and computation.

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arXiv2024

Lane-Change in Dense Traffic with Model Predictive Control and Neural Networks

This paper presents an online smooth-path lane-change control framework. We focus on dense traffic where inter-vehicle space gaps are narrow, and cooperation with surrounding drivers is essential to achieve the lane-change maneuver. We propose a two-stage control framework that harmonizes Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) by utilizing driving intentions to generate smooth lane-change maneuvers. To improve performance in practice, the system is augmented with an adaptive safety boundary and a Kalman Filter to mitigate sensor noise. Simulation studies are investigated in different levels of traffic density and cooperativeness of other drivers. The simulation results support the effectiveness, driving comfort, and safety of the proposed method.

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arXiv2024

Parking of Connected Automated Vehicles: Vehicle Control, Parking Assignment, and Multi-agent Simulation

This paper introduces a comprehensive approach to optimize parking efficiency for connected and Automated vehicle (CAVs) fleets. We present a multi-vehicle parking simulator, equipped with hierarchical path planning and collision avoidance capabilities for individual CAVs. The simulator is designed to capture the key decision-making processes in parking, from low-level vehicle control to high-level parking assignment, and it enables the effective assessment of parking strategies for large fleets of ground vehicles. We formulate and compare different strategic parking spot assignments to minimize a collective cost. While the proposed framework is designed to optimize various objective functions, we choose the total parking time for the experiment, as it directly reflects the congestion level and the cost associated with the parking efficiency. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies through an empirical evaluation against a dataset of real-world parking lot dynamics, realizing a substantial reduction in parking time by up to 43.8%. This improvement is attributed to the synergistic benefits of driving automation, the utilization of shared infrastructure state data, the exclusion of pedestrian traffic, and the real-time computation of optimal parking spot allocation.

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arXiv2023

Online energy management system for a fuel cell/battery hybrid system with multiple fuel cell stacks

Fuel cell (FC)/battery hybrid systems have attracted substantial attention for achieving zero-emissions buses, trucks, ships, and planes. An online energy management system (EMS) is essential for these hybrid systems, it controls energy flow and ensures optimal system performance. Key aspects include fuel efficiency and mitigating FC and battery degradation. This paper proposes a health-aware EMS for FC and battery hybrid systems with multiple FC stacks. The proposed EMS employs mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) to control each FC stack in the hybrid system independently, i.e., MIQP-based individual stack control (ISC), with significant fuel cost reductions, FC and battery degradations. The proposed method is compared with classical dynamic programming (DP), with a 2243 times faster computational speed than the DP method while maintaining nearoptimal performance. The case study results show that ISC achieves a 64.68 % total cost reduction compared to CSC in the examined scenario, with substantial reductions across key metrics including battery degradation (4 %), hydrogen fuel consumption (22 %), fuel cell idling loss (99 %), and fuel cell load-change loss (41 %)

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