Case study: Smart charging plug-in hybrid vehicle test environment with vehicle-to-grid ability

The aim of the paper is to describe and introduce smart charging test environment and plug-in hybrid vehicle capable of smart charging and vehicle to grid functionality. Furthermore, the paper aims at demonstrating simple smart charging strategy in operation on smart charging test bed. The demonstration utilizes commercially available components and open source programming solutions. Charging strategy demonstration is a combination of actual hardware operations and stochastic sampling to synthetize driving cycles of the electric vehicle. Driving behavior synthetizing is based on national travel survey data to ensure reasonable driving behavior in testing of the smart charging strategy. The main outcome of the paper is the description of an actual smart charging test environment. The results also suggest that the charging strategy targeting to minimization of the charging costs may not be feasible for a single customer or single end user. However it must borne in mind that the electricity retailer (or market aggregator) may see some feasible incentives in smart charging strategies based on market price control.