Fair and Privacy-Aware EV Discharging Strategy Using Decentralized Whale Optimization Algorithm for Minimizing Cost of EVs and the EV Aggregator

A key motivation to fasten roll-out of electric vehicles (EVs) to the market is to implement vehicle-to-grid (V2G) functionalities. With V2G in place, EV owners can have an extra freedom to interact their battery energy with power grids, namely, by selling their energy to the grid when their EVs are not in use. On the other hand, EV aggregators and utility companies can leverage the flexibility of the collected energy to implement various ancillary services to the grids, which may significantly reduce costs of, for instance, running spinning reserve of traditional power plants on the grid side. However, this extra freedom also poses practical challenges in terms of how to devise a discharging strategy for a group of EVs that is fair and in some sense optimal. In this article, we present a new design of EV discharging strategy in a typical V2G energy trading framework, while leveraging the whale optimization algorithm in a decentralized manner, a metaheuristic algorithm that has been shown effective in solving large-scale centralized optimization problems. We demonstrate that by using simple ideas of data shuffling and aggregation, one can design an EV discharging strategy in a fair, optimal, and privacy-aware manner, where the privacy refers to the fact that no critical information of EVs should be exchanged with the EV aggregator, and vice versa. The fairness implies that a common discharge rate needs to be sought for all EVs so that no one gets better benefits than others in the same V2G program. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed system.