A smart scheduling strategy for charging and discharging of electric vehicles

In the smart grid environment, Electric Vehicles (EVs) are emerging as an important means of transportation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the large adoption of these vehicles may pose a significant threat to the stability of the electrical grid due to its uncertain charging pattern. This paper proposes a charging-discharging strategy for electric vehicles in a controlled environment (parking lot) considering the variation in market prices and the EV mobility pattern. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective scheduling problem considering maximization of aggregator's profit, minimization of EV charging cost and maximization of EVs departing with target (desired) SOC as the multiple objectives and is solved using a heuristic dynamic optimization method. Extensive simulations are run on three different size aggregators to assess the scalability and robustness of the proposed technique. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed approach is tested by a comparative analysis of the results with various other scheduling algorithms.