Relating Electric Vehicle Charging to Speed Scaling with Job-Specific Speed Limits

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optimal offline EV charging scheduler based on speed scaling models, analyzes online algorithms' competitiveness, and validates findings with real-world data to improve charging efficiency under grid constraints.

Contribution

It presents the FOCS algorithm for optimal EV charging scheduling, relating it to speed scaling with job-specific limits, and analyzes online algorithms' competitive ratios.

Findings

FOCS algorithm is proven optimal for EV charging scheduling.

Online algorithms achieve competitive ratios similar to classical speed scaling.

Numerical results validate theoretical analysis with real-world EV data.

Abstract

Due to the ongoing electrification of transport in combination with limited power grid capacities, efficient ways to schedule the charging of electric vehicles (EVs) are needed for the operation of, for example, large parking lots. Common approaches such as model predictive control repeatedly solve a corresponding offline problem. In this work, we first present and analyze the Flow-based Offline Charging Scheduler (FOCS), an offline algorithm to derive an optimal EV charging schedule for a fleet of EVs that minimizes an increasing, convex and differentiable function of the corresponding aggregated power profile. To this end, we relate EV charging to processor speed scaling models with job-specific speed limits. We prove our algorithm to be optimal and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for any EV charging profile to be optimal. Furthermore, we discuss two online algorithms and their competitive ratios for a specific class objective functions. In particular, we show that if those algorithms are applied and adapted to the presented EV scheduling problem, the competitive ratios for Average Rate and Optimal Available match those of the classical speed scaling problem. Finally, we present numerical results using real-world EV charging data to put the theoretical competitive ratios into a practical perspective.