Optimizing electric vehicle charging: A customer's perspective

Electric vehicles (EVs) are considered to be a promising solution for current gas shortage and emission problems. To maximize the benefits of using EVs, regulated and optimized charging control needs to be provided by load aggregators for connected vehicles. An EV charging network is a typical cyber-physical system, which includes a power grid and a large number of EVs and aggregators that collect information and control the charging procedure. In this paper, we studied EV charging scheduling problems from a customer's perspective by jointly considering the aggregator's revenue and customers' demands and costs. We considered two charging scenarios: static and dynamic. In the static charging scenario, customers' charging demands are provided to the aggregator in advance; however, in the dynamic charging scenario, an EV may come and leave at any time, which is not known to the aggregator in advance. We present linear programming (LP)-based optimal schemes for the static problems and effective heuristic algorithms for the dynamic problems. The dynamic scenario is more realistic; however, the solutions to the static problems can be used to show potential revenue gains and cost savings that can be brought by regulated charging and, thus, can serve as a benchmark for performance evaluation. It has been shown by extensive simulation results based on real electricity price and load data that significant revenue gains and cost savings can be achieved by optimal charging scheduling compared with an unregulated baseline approach, and moreover, the proposed dynamic charging scheduling schemes provide close-to-optimal solutions.