Intelligent Scheduling of Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Storage Capacity in a Parking Lot for Profit Maximization in Grid Power Transactions

This paper proposes an intelligent method for scheduling usage of available energy storage capacity from plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) and electric vehicles (EV). The batteries on these vehicles can either provide power to the grid when parked, known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept or take power from the grid to charge the batteries on the vehicles. A scalable parking lot model is developed with different parameters assigned to fleets of vehicles. The size of the parking lot is assumed to be large enough to accommodate the number of vehicles performing grid transactions. In order to figure out the appropriate charge and discharge times throughout the day, binary particle swarm optimization is applied. Price curves from the California ISO database are used in this study to have realistic price fluctuations. Finding optimal solutions that maximize profits to vehicle owners while satisfying system and vehicle owners constraints is the objective of this study. Different fleets of vehicles are used to approximate varying customer base and demonstrate the scalability of parking lots for V2G. The results are compared for consistency and scalability. Discussions on how this technique can be applied to other grid issues such as peaking power are included at the end.