Asynchrony-Resilient and Privacy-Preserving Charging Protocol for Plug-in Electric Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces an asynchronous, privacy-preserving distributed charging protocol for PEVs using a cutting-plane algorithm, enhancing resilience and practicality over existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cutting-plane based distributed algorithm that ensures asynchronous coordination and privacy preservation in PEV charging.

Findings

Resilient to various asynchrony scenarios

Enables plug-and-play operation mode

Outperforms traditional methods in numerical tests

Abstract

The proliferation of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) advocates a distributed paradigm for the coordination of PEV charging. Distinct from existing primal-dual decomposition or consensus methods, this paper proposes a cutting-plane based distributed algorithm, which enables an asynchronous coordination while well preserving individual's private information. To this end, an equivalent surrogate model is first constructed by exploiting the duality of the original optimization problem, which masks the private information of individual users by a transformation. Then, a cutting-plane based algorithm is derived to solve the surrogate problem in a distributed manner with intrinsic superiority to cope with various asynchrony. Critical implementation issues, such as the distributed initialization, cutting-plane generation and localized stopping criteria, are discussed in detail. Numerical tests on IEEE 37- and 123-node feeders with real data show that the proposed method is resilient to a variety of asynchrony and admits the plug-and-play operation mode. It is expected the proposed methodology provides an alternative path toward a more practical protocol for PEV charging.