Bi-directional coordination of plug-in electric vehicles with economic model predictive control

© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. The emergence of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) is unveiling new opportunities to de-carbonise the vehicle parcs and promote sustainability in different parts of the globe. As battery technologies and PEV efficiency continue to improve, the use of electric cars as distributed energy resources is fast becoming a reality. While the distribution network operators (DNOs) strive to ensure grid balancing and reliability, the PEV owners primarily aim at maximising their economic benefits. However, given that the PEV batteries have limited capacities and the distribution network is constrained, smart techniques are required to coordinate the charging/discharging of the PEVs. Using the economic model predictive control (EMPC) technique, this paper proposes a decentralised optimisation algorithm for PEVs during the grid-To-vehicle (G2V) and vehicle-To-grid (V2G) operations. To capture the operational dynamics of the batteries, it considers the state-of-charge (SoC) at a given time as a discrete state space and investigates PEVs performance in V2G and G2V operations. In particular, this study exploits the variability in the energy tariff across different periods of the day to schedule V2G/G2V cycles using real data from the university's PEV infrastructure. The results show that by charging/discharging the vehicles during optimal time partitions, prosumers can take advantage of the price elasticity of supply to achieve net savings of about 63%

Motion Hub, the implementation of an integrated end-to-end journey planner

© AET 2018 and contributorsThe term “eMobility” and been brought into use partly to encourage use of electric vehicles but more especially to focus on the transformation from electric vehicles as products to electrified personal transport as a service. Under the wider umbrella of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) this has accompanied the growth of car clubs in general. The Motion Hub project has taken this concept a step further to include not just the car journey but the end-to-end journey. The booking of multifaceted journeys is well established in the leisure and business travel industries, where flights, car hire and hotels are regularly booked with a single transaction on a website. To complete an end-to-end scenario Motion Hub provides integration of public transport with electric vehicle and electric bike use. Building on a previous InnovateUK funded project that reviewed the feasibility of an integrated journey management system, the Motion Hub project has brought together a Car Club, a University, and EV infrastructure company, a bicycle hire company with electric bicycle capabilities and a municipality to implement a scheme and test it on the ground. At the heart of the project has been the development of a website that integrates the public transport booking with the hire of electric vehicles or bicycles. Taking the implementation to a fully working system accessible to members of the public presents a number of significant challenges. This paper identifies those challenges, details the progress and success of the Motion Hub and sets out the lessons learnt about end-to-end travel. The project was fortunate to have as its municipal partner the Council of a sizeable South East England town, Southend-on-Sea. With a population of 174,800 residents with good road, rail and air links there is considerable traffic in and out of the town. The Council has already shown its commitment to sustainable transport. In the previous six years it had installed a number of electric vehicle charging points for use by the public and latterly had trialled car club activity. An early challenge in the project was the location of physical infrastructure in an already crowded municipal space in order to provide the local ‘spokes’ of the system. In addition to its existing charging points, Southend now has four locations where electric cars can be hired, five where electric bikes are available and the local resources to maintain these assets. Combining a number of web-based services and amalgamating their financial transactions is relatively straightforward. However, introducing the potential for public transport ticketing as well raises additional security, scale and financial constraints. The project has engaged with major players and regulators across the public transport industry.Peer reviewe

Unsplittable Load Balancing in a Network of Charging Stations Under QoS Guarantees

The operation of the power grid is becoming more stressed, due to the addition of new large loads represented by Electric Vehicles (EVs) and a more intermittent supply due to the incorporation of renewable sources. As a consequence, the coordination and control of projected EV demand in a network of fast charging stations becomes a critical and challenging problem. In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic based decentralized control mechanism to alleviate negative impacts from the EV demand. The proposed mechanism takes into consideration the non-uniform spatial distribution of EVs that induces uneven power demand at each charging facility, and aims to: (i) avoid straining grid resources by offering price incentives so that customers accept being routed to less busy stations, (ii) maximize total revenue by serving more customers with the same amount of grid resources, and (iii) provide charging service to customers with a certain level of Quality-of-Service (QoS), the latter defined as the long term customer blocking probability. We examine three scenarios of increased complexity that gradually approximate real world settings. The obtained results show that the proposed framework leads to substantial performance improvements in terms of the aforementioned goals, when compared to current state of affairs.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Transactions on Smart Gri

Transforming Energy Networks via Peer to Peer Energy Trading: Potential of Game Theoretic Approaches

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has emerged as a next-generation energy management mechanism for the smart grid that enables each prosumer of the network to participate in energy trading with one another and the grid. This poses a significant challenge in terms of modeling the decision-making process of each participant with conflicting interest and motivating prosumers to participate in energy trading and to cooperate, if necessary, for achieving different energy management goals. Therefore, such decision-making process needs to be built on solid mathematical and signal processing tools that can ensure an efficient operation of the smart grid. This paper provides an overview of the use of game theoretic approaches for P2P energy trading as a feasible and effective means of energy management. As such, we discuss various games and auction theoretic approaches by following a systematic classification to provide information on the importance of game theory for smart energy research. Then, the paper focuses on the P2P energy trading describing its key features and giving an introduction to an existing P2P testbed. Further, the paper zooms into the detail of some specific game and auction theoretic models that have recently been used in P2P energy trading and discusses some important finding of these schemes.Comment: 38 pages, single column, double spac