Investigating the Use of Linear Programming and Evolutionary Algorithms for Multi-Objective Electric Vehicle Charging Problem

With the increasing uptake of electric vehicles (EVs), the need for efficient scheduling of EV charging is becoming increasingly important. A charging station operator needs to identify charging/discharging power of the client EVs over a time horizon while considering multiple objectives, such as operating costs and the peak power drawn from the grid. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a popular choice when faced with problems involving multiple objectives. However, since the objectives and constraints of this problem can be expressed using linear functions, it is also possible to come up with improvised multi-objective formulations which can be solved with exact techniques such as mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). With both approaches having their potential strengths and pitfalls, it is worth investigating their use to inform the algorithmic choices, which this study aims to address. In doing so, it makes a number of contributions to the topic, including extension of an existing EV charging problem to a multi-objective form; observing some interesting properties of the problem to improve both the MILP and EA solution approaches; and comparing the performance of MILP and EA. The study provides some useful insights into the problem, initial results and quantitative basis for selecting solution approaches, and highlights some areas of further development.