Optimal V2G scheduling of electric vehicles and Unit Commitment using Chemical Reaction Optimization

An electric vehicle (EV) may be used as energy storage which allows the bi-directional electricity flow between the vehicle's battery and the electric power grid. In order to flatten the load profile of the electricity system, EV scheduling has become a hot research topic in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of the joint scheduling of EV and Unit Commitment (UC), called EVUC. Our formulation considers the characteristics of EVs while optimizing the system total running cost. We employ Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a general-purpose optimization algorithm to solve this problem and the simulation results on a widely used set of instances indicate that CRO can effectively optimize this problem.