Electric Vehicle Charge Scheduling Mechanism to Maximize Cost Efficiency and User Convenience

TL;DR

This paper presents a bi-objective optimization and algorithms for EV charging scheduling that improve user convenience and cost efficiency, reducing charging time and data transmission in micro-grid systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel online centralized and a low-complexity distributed algorithm for EV charge scheduling, optimizing for cost and user convenience with proven Pareto optimality.

Findings

Charging time reduced by 30% compared to existing methods.

Distributed algorithm lowers data transmission by 33.25%.

Performance difference between algorithms is only 2%, with significantly faster computation.

Abstract

This paper investigates the fee scheduling problem of electric vehicles (EVs) at the micro-grid scale. This problem contains a set of charging stations controlled by a central aggregator. One of the main stakeholders is the operator of the charging stations, who is motivated to minimize the cost incurred by the charging stations, while the other major stakeholders are vehicle owners who are mostly interested in user convenience, as they want their EVs to be fully charged as soon as possible. A bi-objective optimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize two factors that correspond to these stakeholders. An online centralized scheduling algorithm is proposed and proven to provide a Pareto-optimal solution. Moreover, a novel low-complexity distributed algorithm is proposed to reduce both the transmission data rate and the computation complexity in the system. The algorithms are evaluated through simulation, and results reveal that the charging time in the proposed method is 30% less than that of the compared methods proposed in the literature. The data transmitted by the distributed algorithm is 33:25% lower than that of a centralized one. While the performance difference between the centralized and distributed algorithms is only 2%, the computation time shows a significant reduction.