Introducing Decentralized EV Charging Coordination for the Voltage Regulation

TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized optimization approach for EV charging to enhance voltage regulation in residential distribution networks, demonstrating promising results through simulations and theoretical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized coordination method for EV charging that considers network impact and analyzes its convergence and performance.

Findings

Global asynchronous approach converges theoretically.

Decentralized methods outperform uncoordinated charging.

Promising voltage regulation performance shown in simulations.

Abstract

This paper investigates a decentralized optimization methodology to coordinate Electric Vehicles (EV) charging in order to contribute to the voltage control on a residential electrical distribution feeder. This aims to maintain the voltage level in function of the EV's power injection using the sensitivity matrix approach. The decentralized optimization is tested with two different methods, respectively global and local, when EV take into account their impact on all the nodes of the network or only on a local neighborhood of their connection point. EV can also update their decisions asynchronously or synchronously. While only the global approach with asynchronous update is theoretically proven to converge, using results from game theory, simulations show the potential of other algorithms for which fewer iterations or fewer informations are necessary. Finally, using Monte Carlo simulations over a wide range of EV localization configurations, the first analysis have also shown a promising performance in comparison with uncoordinated charging or with a "voltage droop charging control" recently proposed in the literature.