Muhammad Babar Rasheed

About the research project «An Optimal Load Scheduling and Fair Pricing Mechanism Using Heuristic Optimization in Smart Grid»

Research Line: Bioinspired efficient energy management

Mentor: Prof. Mª Dolores Rodríguez Moreno

Abstract

Reliable and affordable electricity is key to sustainable economic development in urban or rural environments. In many rural regions, utilities have yet to expand their electrical grids to support relatively remote towns and villages. In the meantime, many communities in urban regions demand an electricity service that is either more reliable or more cost-effective than that offered to them by local utilities. Considering the traditional distribution system, its radial architecture is unable to support the integration of distributed energy sources such as solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs), particularly. Furthermore, due to the lack of communication infrastructure, a single fault can cut power to remaining consumers at the periphery of the network. In the meantime, distribution systems are typically designed for one-way flow out to consume and thus have limited ability to accommodate two-way flow from distributed energy resources. Therefore, new intelligent energy management and customized pricing mechanisms are needed to manage the energy resources through fair electricity prices among residential users, electric vehicle parking lots, and individual vehicles. Thus, proper management of a large amount of energy drawn by EV and residential users and designing the fair electricity prices for both, EV and other users are the on-going research topics of this project. It aims to facilitate and motivate the mass adoption of EV and other distributed energy resources.

About Muhammad Babar Rasheed

Babar has obtained his Ph.D. degrees from COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Pakistan in 2017 with a thesis entitled “User comfort aware energy management system for smart homes”. During the last year of his Doctoral degree, he was awarded a grant under “International Research Support Initiative Program (IRSIP)” of Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan to undertake a joint research project at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA (2016-2017). During this stay, Dr. Babar worked on a small industrial project entitled “the supply side of energy water-nexus”. After the award of the Ph.D. degree, Babar joined The University of Lahore (UOL) as an Assistant Professor of Engineering and taught graduate and undergraduate courses. Then he has been awarded a Post-Doctoral fellowship at King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Saudi Arabia where he worked on different projects related to smart grid and energy management. After that, Dr. Babar has been awarded a Post-Doctoral fellowship at Durham University, United Kingdom (U.K) where he worked on Smart Grid and heuristic optimization algorithms. In 2020, the UOL has promoted him to the rank of Associate Professor based on his performance and achievements. In the meantime, Babar remained actively involved in research and teaching-related activities and published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles in well reputed international journals and conferences. Babar also supervised more than 10 students in their final year projects and theses, while supervising 2 doctoral students in engineering and computer science disciplines. His research interests include operations research, optimization algorithms, smart grids, electric vehicles, demand response, etc. Dr. Babar is also an active reviewer of many esteemed journals including IEEE, Elsevier, Wiley,  Springer, IET, Taylor & Francis, etc. Currently, he is working on developing efficient algorithms in managing energy demand as a GET-COFUND Marie Curie Fellow at UAH.

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