Decentralized Failure-Tolerant Optimization of Electric Vehicle Charging

We present a decentralized failure-tolerant algorithm for optimizing electric vehicle (EV) charging, using charging stations as computing agents. The algorithm is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and it has the following features: (i) It handles coupling constraints for capacity, peak demand, and ancillary services. (ii) It does not require a central agent collecting information and performing coordination (e.g., an aggregator), instead all agents exchange information and computations are carried out in a fully decentralized fashion. (iii) It can withstand the failure of any number of computing agents, as long as the remaining computing agents are in a connected communications network. We construct this algorithm by reformulating the optimal EV charging problem in a decomposable form, amenable to ADMM, and then developing efficient decentralized solution methods for the subproblems dealing with coupling constraints. We conduct numerical experiments on industry-scale synthetic EV charging datasets, with up to 1 152 charging stations, using a high-performance computing cluster. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can solve the optimal EV charging problem fast enough to permit the integration of EV charging with real-time electricity markets, even in the presence of failures.