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New Solutions for Sustainable Mobility Infrastructures and Grid Integration

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Energy Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 13 March 2026 | Viewed by 163

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
R&D Movyon SpA—Autostrade per l’Italia Group, 50123 Firenze, Italy
Interests: electric vehicles; EV power demand forecasting; charging hub

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Guest Editor
Department of Medicine and Health Sciences Vincenzo Tiberio, University of Molise, 86100 Campobasso, Italy
Interests: smart materials and devices; energy harvesting; magnetic sensors and actuators; wireless power transfer; green mobility
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

A large-scale transition to more sustainable mobility solutions is of undeniable urgency. Research and industry have been investigating different approaches to make this shift affordable over the last decades. Electric and hydrogen vehicles seem to be the most promising solutions that can address the necessary revolution of road transport. Nevertheless, economic and technological barriers are slowing down their widespread adoption. Among others, the development of suitable infrastructures for charging and/or refueling vehicles, as well as the integration with the existing road and energy infrastructures, represents a critical challenge.

The aim of this Special Issue is to address the crucial challenge of integrating the new mobility infrastructure, consisting of e-vehicle charging stations and hydrogen refueling stations, with the existing road and energy networks.

We invite submissions of original research articles and reviews in areas that may include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Optimization of charging point locations in urban areas and highways;
  • Charging infrastructure planning and operation;
  • Hydrogen refueling station infrastructure planning and operation;
  • Design and optimal operation of hybrid microgrids with renewables, storage systems, charging stations, hydrogen generation, and conversion systems;
  • Smart charging and vehicle-to-grid (V2G);
  • Vehicle-to-road infrastructure communication;
  • Battery swapping for long-haul transport;
  • Static and dynamic wireless power transfer.

Dr. Valerio Apicella
Dr. Carmine Stefano Clemente
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • sustainable mobility
  • e-mobility
  • charging infrastructure
  • hydrogen mobility
  • hybrid microgrids
  • smart charging
  • V2G
  • V2X
  • wireless power transfer
  • battery swapping

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

15 pages, 2061 KiB  
Article
Optimised Centralised Charging of Electric Vehicles Along Motorways
by Ekaterina Dudkina, Claudio Scarpelli, Valerio Apicella, Massimo Ceraolo and Emanuele Crisostomi
Sustainability 2025, 17(12), 5668; https://doi.org/10.3390/su17125668 - 19 Jun 2025
Abstract
Nowadays, when battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) travel along motorways, their drivers decide where to recharge their cars’ batteries with no or scarce information on the occupancy status of the next charging stations. While this may still be acceptable in most countries, due to [...] Read more.
Nowadays, when battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) travel along motorways, their drivers decide where to recharge their cars’ batteries with no or scarce information on the occupancy status of the next charging stations. While this may still be acceptable in most countries, due to the limited number of EVs on motorways, long queues may build-up in the coming years with increased electric mobility, unless smart allocation strategies are designed and implemented. For instance, as we shall investigate in this manuscript, a centralised coordination of the charging strategies of individual EVs has the potential to significantly reduce the queuing time at charging stations. In particular, in this paper we explain how the charging problem on motorways can be modelled as an optimisation problem, we propose some strategies based on dynamic optimisation to solve it, and we explain how this may be implemented in practice using a centralised charge manager that exchanges information with the EVs and solves the optimisation problems. Finally, we compare in a realistic scenario the current decentralised recharging strategies with a centralised one, and we show that, under simplifying assumptions, queueing times can be reduced by more than 50%. Such a significant reduction allows one to greatly improve vehicular flows and general journey durations without requiring building new infrastructure. Reducing queuing times has a positive impact on traffic congestion and emissions, and the more geographically balanced energy demand of the proposed methodology mitigates energy consumption peaks. Full article
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