Saleem, O. (ECE) – Coupled Evacuation Readiness and Post-Disaster Restoration for Vehicle-to-Grid Enabled Resilient Power–Transportation Networks

The accelerating adoption of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) in California is reshaping both the transportation and electrical grids at the moment as climate-driven disasters are intensifying in frequency and severity. This dual transition exposes a critical structural gap: existing resilience research treats pre-disaster evacuation readiness and post-disaster grid restoration as separate problems, even though both are governed by the same underlying resource, i.e., electric vehicle batteries. On the other hand, same underlying constraint, a damaged, congested transportation network. This dissertation develops an integrated framework that spans the full disaster lifecycle, coupling evacuation-phase EV readiness assessment with restoration-phase vehicle-to-grid (V2G) coordination.

The work begins by establishing a quantitative ZEV Evacuation Readiness Score (ZEV Score) that assess community preparedness across exposure of the region to various natural disasters based on historical data, vulnerabilities of the available infrastructure and the adaptive capacity of the infrastructure under stress. This work was afterwards extended to 44-indicator resilience framework across 6 domains i.e. community engagement, charging infrastructure, mobile and backup power, transportation routing, exposure, equity, and community engagement. Building on this foundation, the dissertation introduces a novel restoration architecture that couples vehicle-routing-problem-based crew dispatch with game-theoretic V2G aggregation through a physics-consistent islanding-duration variable — the first framework to close the loop between road/grid repair scheduling and battery energy management. Validated on the IEEE RTS-79 network with Tesla Model 3 battery dynamics, this coupling eliminates the “battery dead-zone” failure mode entirely, reducing cumulative unsupported outage time from 54.3 to 0 hours under worst-case coordination scenarios, while cutting total load shed by up to 18% beyond standalone repair coordination.

Together, these contributions reframe EV fleets not merely as evacuation liabilities to be planned around, but as a coordinated, timeline-aware energy resource spanning both the flight from disaster and the recovery that follows. The dissertation’s proposed aims extend this integration towards stochastic damage scenarios, heterogeneous mobile energy resources, and a unified pre- to post-disaster co-optimization pipeline. Which offer both a technical bridge between restoration engineering and evacuation planning, and a policy-relevant tool for California communities navigating a fully electrified, climate-exposed future.

Event Host: Osman Saleem, Ph.D. Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Advisor: Keith Corzine & Leila Parsa 

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96031345847?pwd=bjLMYhuyPyIMt7deiEKWRh35I7vjUW.1

Passcode: 544944