CU Boulder will play a major role in a new center focused on developing infrastructure and systems that facilitate the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

ASPIRE—Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification will explore a diverse range of transportation questions, from electrified highways that energize vehicles to the placement of charging stations, data security and workforce development.

“We need to understand the factors that are impacting the development and adoption of this technology so that we’re solving the right problems,” said Qin (Christine) Lv, ASPIRE’s CU Boulder campus director and co-Principal Investigator of the Engineering Research Center.

nder research, ASPIRE will focus on transportation, adoption, power and data. When this proposal was first presented to Lv, she saw great potential for data analytics research and application.

“If you look at all these pieces, there are a lot of data—and data really can play a very important role in terms of connecting the different components together,” said Lv, who will lead the data research thrust within ASPIRE.

Data is important for electrifying transportation not only because it can help plan how much charge is available at which charging stations and when, but where they should be built, based on traffic data, consumer preferences and more.

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“We’re looking at various kinds of scenarios where you can get data and leverage data to analyze the patterns, to optimize or plan and also to improve the performance of the system,” said Lv.

Data security is also important to protect charging infrastructures and individual vehicles from malicious attacks.

CU Boulder faculty from multiple departments within the College of Engineering and Applied Science are involved with ASPIRE.