Funded research

BMWK: unIT-e²

unIT-e² - Reallabor für verNETZte E-Mobilität

The project unIT-e² brings together 29 interdisciplinary partners from the automotive, the energy and the scientific sectors in a collaborative effort to pursue the goal of integrating e-mobility into the german power grid in a holistic and sustainable way.  The CENTOURIS research team aims to explore customer requirements, focusing in particular on the design of attractive business and incentive systems as well as on the regulatory framework for intelligent charging concepts.

The energy transition in Germany, driven by a shift from conventional energy management to renewable energy sources, opens up new challenges for today´s society. The transition process is directly influencing our day-to-day lives, with the electricity, heating and mobility sectors being most affected. Therefore, innovative concepts and solutions must be developed to meet present and future needs in the areas of sustainability, efficiency and security. This means especially that new solutions must be created to integrate e-mobility in an intelligent and secure way into existing and emerging infrastructures.

The Project

A total of 29 partners from the automotive and energy sector, IT and charging infrastructure, and from the scientific sector are collaborating in the unIT-e² project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, with the goal of pursuing a holistic and sustainable integration of electromobility into the german energy system. The projects main research interest is large-scale and user-friendly implementation of uni- and bidirectional charging concepts. In order to adequately address any technical, economic and social challenges, the unIT-e² project creates a cross-sectoral platform, where all relevant stakeholders, although having partly competing interests, meet within a neutral framework and under the accompaniment of scientific research. This enables the formulation of interoperable standards and the creation of sustainable sector coupling.

The project’s insights concerning technical implementation and customer experience will significantly influence the project partners’ product design. This includes, for example, the development of customer-oriented charging concepts in the context of bidirectional charging. The integration of electromobility into the daily structures of our private and public sphere is being advanced by further developing the required components and testing them in real-life use cases. In addition, intelligent charging and energy management algorithms create new solutions in the area of hardware and software, that will expand the existing technical infrastructure with grid-supporting and ecological approaches. The project’s research process also includes the examination of legal and regulatory issues, as well as user behaviour.

The unIT-e² project is divided into four different clusters: Harmon-E, Heav-E, sun-E and Cit-E-Life. In each of these clusters, real-life testing approaches will be established, which will provide the basis for scientific examination with different thematic and regional priorities. To accompany this, three sub-projects have been established, that pay special attention on general frameworks and operational sequences, which are relevant to all project partners. These sub-projects aim to synthesise the four clusters’ individual results with the purpose of creating holistic and sustainable concepts.

Being part of the sun-E cluster, CENTOURIS focuses in particular on the design of attractive business and incentive systems, as well as on the regulatory framework for intelligent charging concepts. Considering customer feedback, obtained from user surveys and usability tests, the main goal is to find out, how the highest possible level of user acceptance can be achieved. By systematically focusing on user perspective, CENTOURIS contributes to a user-friendly design of new business models in the context of electromobility, as well as the development of new management and marketing strategies, that consider interindividual customer differences.


Project Duration: 08/2021 - 07/2024

Project Amount: 1.044.101,26 €

Project Websitehttps://unit-e2.de/

Project Website of the University of Passau: https://www.uni-passau.de/unit-e2/

Further participating Institutions:

At the University of Passau a project team of the Institute CENTOURIS and the chair of Marketing and Innovation collaborates in order to achieve the aims of the project.

Contact:

Logo des Förderprojektes unIT-e²
Logo des Projektträgers Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
Förderhinweis des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz.