Decentralized cooperative approach for electric vehicle charging

The proliferation in the deployment of electric vehicles has brought up several challenges in the planning and operation of power systems. The health of power system components and the satisfaction of electric vehicle users are becoming equally important with the increasing presence of electric vehicles on the power grid. The charging strategy is crucial as it plays a significant role in shaping users’ behavior to deal with the adverse effects of electric vehicles on grid components. There is a lack of a proper unified framework for the charging management, which considers both the system perspectives such as transformer overloading, shortage of power, and users perspectives such as satisfaction, charging urgency, and privacy. This paper presents a fully decentralized cooperative approach/strategy for charging electric vehicles. The solution is achieved by developing a decentralized iterative algorithm based on a consensus concept to protect the privacy of EV owners. The charging priority factor is incorporated to address the charging urgency of electric vehicles. Multiple electric vehicles can be charged simultaneously without a central decision-maker or coordinator using the proposed strategy. As a result, electric vehicles fulfill their charging needs by the deadline to maximize user satisfaction while respecting their constraints and limitations imposed by the available charging power and charging station capacity. The convergence of the proposed approach is demonstrated by observing the charging of multiple electric vehicles. The results are benchmarked against the centralized approach to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.