Distributed Scheduling of Electric Vehicles in a Residential Area in Thailand

The number of Electric Vehicles (EVs) is expected to rise in the coming future as an aim to be eco-friendly. However, a high penetration of EVs may result in power outages or transformer damage due to overloading. Smart Grid technology enables us to manage the charging of EVs in the form of demand side management. In this paper we applied the distributed scheduling algorithm, which we called Aggregate Power Sharing (APS), proposed by [Chen et al, 2014] to coordinate the charging schedules of EVs in a residential area in Pattaya, Thailand, being supplied by a distribution transformer. This area was one of the pilot projects for Smart Grid in Thailand. We compare APS with a popular water-filling scheduling algorithm and with the no scheduling case. With the two scheduling algorithms, the aggregate power consumption in the area does not violate the target aggregate load profile and more EVs can be supported by the transformer, compared to the no-scheduling case. In addition, the APS scheduling provides better fairness than water-filling since each EV is essentially charged at the same rate, independent of the state of charge of the batteries.