Living Lab

Goals of the project

• Develop and install a Living Lab on electric mobility at University of Campinas;
• Investigate technical, economical and environmental impacts;
• Develop approaches for intelligent management of buses (conventional as well as electric), recharges and power grid.
• Investigate impacts on the distribution grid along with the inclusion of storage devices, distributed generation based on renewables and IoT devices for real-time monitoring.

This project is based upon the wide monitoring and real-time connectivity of urban public transport vehicles, in order to enable the design of useful solutions for: (i) public transport management, (ii) public road maintenance management, (iii) continuous evaluation and improvement of drivers, (iv) traffic management, (v) evaluation of public transportation user comfort, (vi) pollution monitoring and (vii) Evaluation and mitigation of impacts due to electrical buses on the power system. Additionally, monitored data can be used to design signals encouraging the use of the public transportation system to reduce the demand at specific times, thus enabling optimized fleet management.

The living laboratory is being designed and implemented with resources of P&D ANEEL PA 3043 – Living Laboratory of Mobility for Collective Transport at UNICAMP: Integration of Sustainable Electric Station, Wide Monitoring and Real-Time Connectivity. In this laboratory, the bus fleet used to attend the public at the Barão Geraldo Campus, composed of seven conventional buses powered by fossil fuels plus one electric bus, will be monitored in real-time with a great diversity of sensors. The main pillars of the prosed living lab are shown in figure bellow.

The main motivating aspects are:

• The presence on the Campus of a totally controlled transportation system based on conventional buses, providing the proper conditions for a broad and realistic comparison;
• Implement and investigate a Zero-Energy Charge Station (ZECS) based on renewable sources and storage;
• Develop technologies for proper monitoring of electrical buses;
• Integration of this proposal with the Sustainable Campus;
• The presence of partnership companies close to the University (assembling photovoltaic panels, electric buses and storage systems).

This project is innovative because it will be developed in a living laboratory environment of electric mobility. The measurement, sensoring and communication infrastructure will be enhanced and complemented to meet the specific needs of the project. Diverse technologies will be shared with the living laboratory of UNICAMP, which speeds up the developments, unifies the solutions and makes costs more affordable.