I am a Professor in the School of Control Science and Engineering at Shandong University. My research develops deep reinforcement learning and optimization methods for electric vehicle charging networks and smart energy systems.
Electric vehicles, heavy-duty trucks, buses, and port tractors are becoming a large and highly variable load on the distribution grid. I work on how to schedule and price their charging — across single stations, highway corridors, and regional networks — so that charging fleets act as a flexibility resource for the grid rather than a source of stress. A recurring theme is making learning-based controllers safe enough to deploy in the field: policies that never violate transformer ratings, voltage limits, or state-of-charge bounds, and that come with provable performance guarantees.
My work spans three areas:
Electric vehicle charging scheduling and transportation–energy integration — charging network modeling, dynamic pricing, megawatt-scale fast charging, dynamic wireless charging, vehicle-to-grid interaction.
Deep reinforcement learning and safe decision-making — constraint-embedded policy learning, action space reduction, multi-agent coordination, cross-site policy transfer.
Smart energy system optimization and intelligent control — battery storage plants, industrial parks, data centers, and buildings; stochastic and robust optimization, model predictive control.
Before joining Shandong University in December 2023, I was a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Lang Tong at Cornell University. I completed my Ph.D. with Prof. Yunjian Xu at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and my B.Eng. at Wuhan University.
Openings
I am recruiting Ph.D. and Master’s students for Fall 2027, and postdoctoral researchers and research assistants on a rolling basis, in deep reinforcement learning, electric vehicle charging optimization, and smart energy systems. The group works on algorithms and simulation — mostly Python, optimization solvers, and reinforcement learning frameworks. Every student has their own project, and I work closely with people on their first paper.
Admission programs: Control Science and Engineering (081100), Control Engineering (085406), Power Electronics and Power Drives (080804), and Electrical Engineering (085801). Backgrounds in control, electrical engineering, automation, machine learning, computer science, operations research, or applied mathematics all fit well.
The group collaborates with Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), and Huawei Hong Kong Research Center. Students have opportunities to join international projects and to spend time at partner institutions.
If you are interested, email me at LLHAO@sdu.edu.cn with your CV and transcript.
