Day-Ahead Scheduling for EV-Based Virtual Energy Routers in Radial Microgrids

Electric vehicles (EVs) can act as virtual energy routers (VERs) in the grid, giving them the flexibility to change the direction of energy flow. Therefore, a day-ahead scheduling for radial microgrids deploying EV-based VERs is proposed. In the day-ahead scheduling, the charging/discharging operation, state of charge (SOC), and available time of EV-based VERs are involved in the social utility maximization problem. With the laxity model of EV-based VERs and the forecasted reference demand, the supply and demand in the microgrid are optimized to minimize generation costs and maximize consumer utility in a whole day. Binary variables, which indicate the charging and discharging choices of the EV-based VERs, exist in the day-ahead scheduling. Therefore, mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) is adopted to solve the optimization problem. The simulation cases are then provided to verify the effectiveness of the suggested day-ahead scheduling approach.