EV Charging Station Wholesale Market Participation: A Strategic Bidding and Pricing Approach

TL;DR

This paper develops a bi-level optimization framework for EV charging station aggregators to optimize bidding and pricing strategies in wholesale markets, considering technical constraints and owner preferences.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mixed-integer convex quadratic programming model that simplifies the complex bi-level problem for practical solution.

Findings

Framework effectively models EV owner preferences and station constraints.

Simulation results demonstrate the approach's viability and potential profitability.

The method provides a tractable solution to a non-convex optimization problem.

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for simultaneous bidding and pricing strategy for wholesale market participation of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations aggregator. The proposed framework incorporates the EV charging stations' technical constraints as well as EV owners' preferences. A bi-level optimization is adopted to model the problem. In the upper level, the total profit of the EV charging station aggregator is maximized. In the lower-level problem, the EV owner's utility function is maximized. The EV owners' preferences are modeled using the quadratic utility function. The bi-level optimization problem which is non-convex and hard to solve is converted to a mixed-integer convex quadratic programming model by writing the optimal conditions of the lower-level problem that is solvable with commercial solvers. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is investigated by implementing simulation results.