Charge Scheduling Optimization of Electric Vehicles: A Comprehensive Review of Essentiality, Perspectives, Techniques, and Security

The transportation sector is one among the key sources of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) leading to climate change and global warming. Energy transition through electrified transportation is one of the solutions to tackle the issues. Electric vehicles (EVs) offer significant environmental and economic advantages against the conventional Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles. EVs are called mobility loads and their connectivity to the utility grid for charging is unpredictable. The large penetration of such unpredictable loads into the utility grid will lead to undesirable impacts on the utility service. This paper highlights the importance of managing and optimizing the charging schedules. The optimization of EV charging has diverse aspects, and the perspectives of EV charging differ among consumers, aggregators, and utility services. Proper planning and management of EV charging is essential to achieve harmony amongst these stakeholders. A comprehensive review on the objectives of electric vehicle charging optimization from various perspectives is presented and discussed in this paper. EV charging optimization techniques including mathematical programming, meta heuristics algorithms and machine learning techniques are explored. The main objectives, constraints, strength, and limitations of different charging optimization techniques are analyzed in detail. A brief discussion on the communication strategies for data exchange in EV charging framework is presented and the need for a communication security constrained EV charging scheduling is also emphasized.