Min-max control of fuel-cell-car-based smart energy systems

Recently, the idea of using fuel cell vehicles as the future way of producing electricity has emerged. A fuel cell car has all the necessary devices on board to convert the chemical energy of hydrogen into electricity. This paper considers a scenario where a parking lot for fuel cell cars acts as a virtual power plant. In order to describe the system behavior from the energy point of view, a hybrid (mixed logical dynamical) model is constructed. With this model, a control system is designed to determine the production profile for both the fuel cell and battery of each car in the parking lot subject to minimizing the operational cost. In order to deal with both the uncertainty in the demand profile and the power balance constraint, a robust min-max model predictive control algorithm is developed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated in a numerical example.