On-line Decentralized Charging of Plug-In Electric Vehicles in Power Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized, myopic smart charging algorithm for PEVs that minimizes load variance, maintains a flat load profile, and is robust against uncertainties without requiring future system information.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized and asymptotically optimal charging algorithm that operates in real-time without forecast data, improving robustness and scalability.

Findings

Achieves asymptotic optimality in load variance minimization.

Operates in a decentralized manner based on current system states.

Robust against uncertainties like random driving patterns and intermittent renewable energy.

Abstract

The concept of plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) are gaining increasing popularity in recent years, due to the growing societal awareness of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and gaining independence on foreign oil or petroleum. Large-scale deployment of PEVs currently faces many challenges. One particular concern is that the PEV charging can potentially cause significant impacts on the existing power distribution system, due to the increase in peak load. As such, this work tries to mitigate the impacts of PEV charging by proposing a decentralized smart PEV charging algorithm to minimize the distribution system load variance, so that a `flat' total load profile can be obtained. The charging algorithm is myopic, in that it controls the PEV charging processes in each time slot based entirely on the current power system states, without knowledge about future system dynamics. We provide theoretical guarantees on the asymptotic optimality of the proposed charging algorithm. Thus, compared to other forecast based smart charging approaches in the literature, the charging algorithm not only achieves optimality asymptotically in an on-line, and decentralized manner, but also is robust against various uncertainties in the power system, such as random PEV driving patterns and distributed generation (DG) with highly intermittent renewable energy sources.