Imagine a campus where vehicles, road signs and mobile devices all communicate with each other in order to increase safety, decrease travel times, and enhance fuel efficiency. Leaders at Argonne National Laboratory have imagined this innovative space – it’s easy if you try. The laboratory, with its diverse research capabilities and expertise, is in a unique position to make this vision a reality in the form of a ‘Smart Energy Campus.’
A ‘Smart Energy Campus,’ is a concept that would use Argonne’s pre-existing facilities, employees, and research capabilities to create a local mobility district and vehicle infrastructure testbed, one that collects and analyzes data, with lessons that could be scaled up for numerous applications. With Argonne’s unique mix of research engineers and scientists, we have the capacity to put together the many puzzle pieces that a superior smart campus testbed would require.
“Argonne’s campus offers a controlled, low speed (less than 35mph) testing and research environment able to accommodate the full spectrum of connected and automated vehicle and component technologies, said Eric Rask, principle research engineer in Argonne’s Center for Transportation Research (CTR). “With a relatively dense inner-ring comprised of research buildings and parking surrounded by a less dense network of roadways, buildings, and surface parking lots, a wide variety of on-site automation, connectivity, electrification, and mobility evaluations can take place, making it a unique environment to investigate emerging mobility applications and technologies.”
Argonne has a vast transportation research portfolio that can be leveraged for a smart energy campus, from experimental hardware and software development to virtual model-based system engineering tools. The lab is also home to some of the most knowledgeable experts in the field, including experts on automation, technology integration, cyber security, safety and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Analysts are also equipped to study the impacts on the built environment, modality choices, consumer interface and behaviors and infrastructure requirements.
In fact, multiple modes of transportation are used by Argonne employees themselves, who make daily decisions on modality just as someone living in a city or suburb. With Argonne’s unique location adjacent to a major city (Chicago), and approximate to, but not serviced by, most public transportation, employees and visitors often make several choices each day on how they prefer to get to their destination.
“Imagine all the people sharing all the world.”
Sharing is part of our transportation economy; from buses to vehicle sharing apps, people share in the multiple modes of transport they use each day. As multimodality is an important aspect of the future of transportation, we must study consumer choices and preferences as well as vehicle technology if we are to meet and improve all future transportation needs. To do so requires analyzing and interpreting large amounts data – one focus of Argonne’s Advanced Leadership Computing Facility. Researchers there are studying big data, predictive analytics, visualization, and artificial intelligence, among others. With data analysis often being one of the largest hurdles for data collection, the facility’s expertise can provide exceptional interpretations with direct application to Connected Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and the transportation ecosystem.
And what might this “Smart Energy Campus” look like for Argonne employees and guests? When it’s time for that meeting across campus, an app on their phone could summon an automated shuttle van to drop them off. During waiting times, that shuttle moves to a charging station to refuel before it arrives again within minutes of their meeting ending. All the while, data is being collected on this technology and its use, and continually analyzed to ensure that the whole system operates smoothly and efficiently.
Quality data is vital for improving the types of products that would be tested on campus, and can be a useful resource for scientists who want to look at transportation use patterns. Argonne has extensive expertise in measuring and collecting sensory data, as showcased through Waggle, a popular open-source platform for placing sensors, computation, and other instruments in remote, harsh environments developed by Argonne researchers.
Waggle software and hardware designs are currently employed in Array of Things, Chicago’s networked urban sensor project, to collect and transmit environmental data. The sensory modules used collect real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use, measuring factors that impact livability in Chicago such as climate, air quality and noise. Incorporating air quality and environmental sensors including vibration, noise, and various gases, the Waggle-based Array of Things nodes measure transportation-related impacts on the urban environment. Moreover, the devices use machine learning techniques, running on high performance processors within each node, to process images to measure pedestrian and traffic flows, visibility, and flooding. The nodes are remotely programmable, and scientists are developing new computer vision capabilities to detect safety related events such as near miss events. Modules such as these could be used to gather real-time data at Argonne on things like road surface, population density, and impacts on the local grid - the applications are endless.
From a security perspective, the benefits of a connected campus are also encouraging. For security and safety officers, information on the number of employees on campus at any given moment, the ability to quickly communicate the location and details of a potential threat, and the information to guide a seamless traffic flow in the event of an evacuation are priceless.
Argonne is working on several projects that are already laying the foundation for a Smart Energy Campus. In 2017, the Center for Transportation Research transformed a former campus gas station and parking lot into a Smart Energy Plaza, including the installation of a 40-kW solar canopy, three Level 2 EV charging stations, a 50-kW fast charging station, and is currently installing a 350-kW extreme fast-charging station. The building itself was remodeled to include a climate controlled system and a repurposed EV battery for energy storage in the building. The plaza will be used for grid integration and interoperability studies, but also meets campus sustainability goals by generating more electricity than it uses from the solar canopy. This building is a jump-start to preparing infrastructure for the grid demand that will invariably arise with the increase of advanced electric vehicles.
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”
This integration of research and sustainability goals is important to CTR Director Ann Schlenker, who describes the Smart Energy Plaza as a microcosm of a new forward-looking vision for how energy and transportation services are monitored and proactively managed.
“Argonne can be thought of as a small city,” said Schlenker. “There is really great opportunity here to test different energy sources and different transportation applications and then share best practices. We have all the components of a larger area; people working, driving to, and occupying the site. However, Argonne is a closed campus, so you have a safe and secure environment to collect real world data on how these human and mechanical systems work together.”
The ultimate goal would be to apply these technologies to modern communities as well as our larger cities. Having a place like Argonne National Laboratory experiment with these technologies prior to wider implementation would benefit transportation and mobility R&D. We can imagine that, with 3,200 researchers, scientists, engineers, and staff united in shaping a sustainable future, we have many of the tools necessary to meet this challenge.
The Array of Things project is led by Argonne Computer Scientist Charlie Catlett and researchers from the Urban Center for Computation and Data of the Computation Institute, a joint initiative of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago.