Smart Charging Strategy for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

Although the concept of transportation electrification holds enormous prospects in addressing the global environmental pollution problem, in reality the market penetration of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) has been very low. Consumer concerns over the limited availability of charging facilities and unacceptably long charging periods are major factors behind this low penetration rate. From the perspective of the electricity grid, a longer PEV peak load period can potentially overlap with the residential peak load period, making energy management more challenging. A suitably designed charging strategy can help to address these concerns, which motivated us to conduct this research. In this paper, we present a smart charging strategy for a PEV network that offers multiple charging options, including ac level 2 charging, dc fast charging, and battery swapping facilities at charging stations. For a PEV requiring charging facilities, we model the issue of finding the optimal charging station as a multiobjective optimization problem, where the goal is to find a station that ensures the minimum charging time, travel time, and charging cost. We extend the model to a metaheuristic solution in the form of an ant colony optimization. Simulation results show that the proposed solution significantly reduces waiting time and charging cost.