Energy Management Framework for Electric Vehicles in the Smart Grid: A Three-Party Game

With the rapid development of EVs and their penetration in our modern society, the energy management issues in the smart grid integrated with EVs are attracting more and more research interest. Most of the existing literature only involves two-sided interactions between the EVs and the power grid or the smart home/buildings in the DSM investigation. In fact, however, similar to EVs, when equipped with distributed renewable energy sources and electricity storage facilities, SCs can also be regarded as either energy consumers or energy providers with their individual rationality. This can lead to increased flexibility of the energy management and power trading in the power system involving both EVs and SCs. In this article, we propose a three-party architecture for the smart grid integrated with EVs, involving complex and flexible interactions among the power grid, EVs, and SCs. Based on the proposed three-party architecture, we introduce two interesting systems, SC-centered and EV-centered systems, and further propose a schedule-upon-request energy management framework to achieve effective and intelligent energy management in the power system involving both EVs and SCs. Feasible optimization methods for energy management problems in this framework are also summarized.