We propose a novel way to use Electric Vehicles (EVs) as dynamic mobile energy storage with the goal to support grid balancing during peak load times. EVs seeking parking in a busy expensive inner city area, can get free parking with a valet company in exchange for being utilized for grid support. The valet company would have an agreement with the local utility company to receive varying rewards for discharging EVs at designated times and locations of need (say, where power lines are congested). Given vehicle availabilities, the valet company would compute an optimal schedule of which vehicle to utilize where and when so as to maximize rewards collected. Our contributions are a detailed description of this new concept along with supporting theory to bring it to fruition. On the theory side, we provide new hardness results, as well as efficient algorithms with provable performance guarantees that we also test empirically.
Hutson al @cite_16 propose an intelligent scheduling of EVs in a parking lot, so as to maximize profits by discharging EVs at the times when the market power price is high, and charging when the price is low. The spatial variation of the price is not considered in their model. Finally, they utilize a particle swarm optimization approach that does not provide any guarantee and, indeed, it can suffer from premature convergence. In contrast, we provide guarantees. But more importantly, our goal is to alleviate congestion for the utility and not to collect the highest market power price. Sometimes these may coincide but are not necessarily related in general. Additionally, we charge and discharge EVs in multiple locations in a geographic area as opposed to one parking lot.
@cite_16
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This paper proposes an intelligent method for scheduling usage of available energy storage capacity from plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) and electric vehicles (EV). The batteries on these vehicles can either provide power to the grid when parked, known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept or take power from the grid to charge the batteries on the vehicles. A scalable parking lot model is developed with different parameters assigned to fleets of vehicles. The size of the parking lot is assumed to be large enough to accommodate the number of vehicles performing grid transactions. In order to figure out the appropriate charge and discharge times throughout the day, binary particle swarm optimization is applied. Price curves from the California ISO database are used in this study to have realistic price fluctuations. Finding optimal solutions that maximize profits to vehicle owners while satisfying system and vehicle owners constraints is the objective of this study. Different fleets of vehicles are used to approximate varying customer base and demonstrate the scalability of parking lots for V2G. The results are compared for consistency and scalability. Discussions on how this technique can be applied to other grid issues such as peaking power are included at the end. The vehicle electrification will have a significant impact on the power grid due to the increase in electricity consumption. It is important to perform intelligent scheduling for charging and discharging of electric vehicles (EVs). However, there are two major challenges in the scheduling problem. First, it is challenging to find the globally optimal scheduling solution which can minimize the total cost. Second, it is difficult to find a distributed scheduling scheme which can handle a large population and the random arrivals of the EVs. In this paper, we propose a globally optimal scheduling scheme and a locally optimal scheduling scheme for EV charging and discharging. We first formulate a global scheduling optimization problem, in which the charging powers are optimized to minimize the total cost of all EVs which perform charging and discharging during the day. The globally optimal solution provides the globally minimal total cost. However, the globally optimal scheduling scheme is impractical since it requires the information on the future base loads and the arrival times and the charging periods of the EVs that will arrive in the future time of the day. To develop a practical scheduling scheme, we then formulate a local scheduling optimization problem, which aims to minimize the total cost of the EVs in the current ongoing EV set in the local group. The locally optimal scheduling scheme is not only scalable to a large EV population but also resilient to the dynamic EV arrivals. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the locally optimal scheduling scheme can achieve a close performance compared to the globally optimal scheduling scheme. This paper proposes a novel cooperative charging strategy for a smart charging station in the dynamic electricity pricing environment, which helps electric vehicles (EVs) to economically accomplish the charging task by the given deadlines. This strategy allows EVs to share their battery-stored energy with each other under the coordination of an aggregator, so that more flexibility is given to the aggregator for better scheduling. Mathematically, the scheduling problem is formulated as a constrained mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to capture the discrete nature of the battery states, i.e., charging, idle and discharging. Then, an efficient algorithm is proposed to solve the MILP by means of dual decomposition and Benders decomposition. At last, the algorithm can be implemented in a distributed fashion, which makes it scalable and thus suitable for large-scale scheduling problems. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis. In this paper, we consider delay-optimal charging scheduling of the electric vehicles (EVs) at a charging station with multiple charge points. The charging station is equipped with renewable energy generation devices and can also buy energy from power grids. The uncertainty of the arrival of the EV, the intermittence of the renewable energy, and the variation of the grid power price are taken into account and described as independent Markov processes. Meanwhile, the required charging energy for each EV is random. The goal is to minimize the mean waiting time for EVs under the long-term constraint on the cost. We propose queue mapping to convert the EV queue to the charging demand queue, and we prove the equivalence between the minimization of the two queues' average length. Then, we focus on the minimization for the average length of the charging demand queue under the long-term cost constraint. We propose a framework of Markov decision process (MDP) to investigate this constrained stochastic optimization problem. The system state includes the charging demand queue length, the charging demand arrival, the energy level in the storage battery of the renewable energy, the renewable energy arrival, and the grid power price. Additionally, the number of charging demands and the allocated energy from the storage battery compose the 2-D policy. We derive two necessary conditions of the optimal policy. Moreover, we discuss the reduction of the 2-D policy to be the number of charging demands only. We give the sets of system states for which charging no demand and charging as many demands as possible are optimal, respectively. Finally, we investigate the proposed policies numerically.