In the near future, public transportation systems will increasingly rely on electric vehicles to
serve local communities. A key driver for this transformation is the environmental and health benefits that the lower-emissions system offers. A key challenge for this transformation, however, is to account for the transportation system’s coupling effects in the local electric power systems.
In other words, with increasing numbers of electric vehicles, the local community’s electric and
public transportation infrastructure are increasingly coupled and, therefore, upgrades, changes, or disruptions in one infrastructure system can propagate to the other.
The underlying complexity for designing, planning, operating, and maintaining electrified public
transit systems is to manage multiple—sometimes conflicting—objectives, while dealing with
a variety of constraints, uncertainties, and disruptions across the transportation and electricity
infrastructure systems. This research is positioned to address this exact challenge. Specifically,
it aims to develop a joint transportation–electricity infrastructure for tomorrow’s transit systems
that will ensure reliable service, higher energy efficiency, reduced environmental impact, and lower total costs to the serving community.
In this research, we describe an integrative research project to develop adaptive platforms that
support electric public transportation systems and better meet the needs of the local community.
These platforms focus on three key aspects of designing, operating, and maintaining future public  transportation systems:

(1) how to power their electric vehicles (adaptive microgrids)                                                           (2) how to jointly dispatch transportation and electric power resources (dispatch algorithms)         (3) how to adapt to both acute and gradual changes in the system (data-driven system feedback)

The project will allow the first collaboration between all of the needed members of a large
interdisciplinary team. The goal of this project is to create the preliminary results that puts the
team in position for successfully supporting a nationally-recognized, externally-funded and first-of-its-kind research program in electrification of transportation networks at Lehigh.