Event-based EV Charging Scheduling in A Microgrid of Buildings

TL;DR

This paper proposes an event-based control framework using Markov decision processes and policy optimization to efficiently manage EV charging in a building microgrid, reducing costs and ensuring transmission safety amid demand uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel event-based optimization approach with a gradient-based policy method for EV charging control in microgrids, addressing large state and action spaces.

Findings

Effective EV charging control policy achieved in simulations

Reduced operation costs in the microgrid

Maintained transmission safety constraints

Abstract

With the popularization of the electric vehicles (EVs), EV charging demand is becoming an important load in the building. Considering the mobility of EVs from building to building and their uncertain charging demand, it is of great practical interest to control the EV charging process in a microgrid of buildings to optimize the total operation cost while ensuring the transmission safety between the microgrid and the main grid. We consider this important problem in this paper and make the following contributions. First, we formulate this problem as a Markov decision process to capture the uncertain supply and EV charging demand in the microgrid of buildings. Besides reducing the total operation cost of buildings, the model also considers the power exchange limitation to ensure transmission safety. Second, this model is reformulated under event-based optimization framework to alleviate the impact of large state and action space. By appropriately defining the event and event-based action, the EV charging process can be optimized by searching a randomized parametric event-based control policy in the microgrid controller and implementing a selecting-to-charging rule in each building controller. Third, a constrained gradient-based policy optimzation method with adjusting mechanism is proposed to iteratively find the optimal event-based control policy for EV charging demand in each building. Numerical experiments considering a microgrid of three buildings are conducted to analyze the structure and the performance of the event-based control policy for EV charging.