Scheduling of Electric Vehicle Charging via Multi-Server Fair Queueing

Charging electric vehicles (EVs) at home is attractive to EV users. However, when the penetration level of EVs becomes high, a distribution grid suffers from problems such as under-voltage and transformer overloading. EV users also experience a fairness problem, i.e., the limited capacity is unfairly shared among EVs. To solve these problems, a physical fair-queueing framework is established for EV charging. In this framework, a distribution sub-grid is first mapped to a multi-server queueing system, and then a fluid-model based queueing scheme called physical multi-server generalized processor sharing (pMGPS) is designed. pMGPS ensures perfect fairness but cannot be used practically due to its nature of fluid model. To this end, a packetized scheme called physical start-time fair queueing (pSTFQ) is developed to schedule tasks of EV charging. The fairness performance of the pSTFQ scheduling scheme is characterized by the ratio of energy difference between pSTFQ and pMGPS. This critical performance metric is studied through theoretical analysis and is also evaluated via simulations. Performance results show that the pSTFQ scheduling scheme achieves an energy difference ratio of less than 4 percent in various scenarios without causing under-voltage and transformer overloading problems.