5G‐enhanced smart grid services

This chapter focuses on the 5G key concepts and how they can be extremely beneficial in supporting the advanced smart grid services. It introduces the smart grid environment and discusses some of the future services that will be supported in the future smart grids. These services are broadly classified into two categories, namely data collection and management services that target enhanced grid monitoring capabilities, and control and operation services that deal with demand side management and electric vehicle charging and discharging coordination. The chapter illustrates how the 5G novel concepts such as software‐defined networking, network virtualization, and cloud computing offer enhanced services for grid monitoring, data processing, demand‐side management, and electric vehicle charging and discharging coordination. It also illustrates a summary of the application of these concepts in supporting the smart grid services. Future research directions are discussed to deal with the open challenging issues

Contextual dishonest behaviour detection for cognitive adaptive charging in dynamic smart micro-grids

The emerging Smart Grid (SG) paradigm promises to address decreasing grid stability from thinning safe operating margins, meet continually rising demand from pervasive high capacity devices such as electric vehicles (EVs), and fully embrace the shift towards green energy solutions. At the SG edge, widespread decentralisation of heterogeneous devices coupled with fluctuating energy availability and need as well as a greatly increased fluidity between their roles as energy producers, consumers, and stores raises significant challenges to ensuring robustness and security of both information and energy exchange. Detecting and mitigating both malicious and non-malicious threats in these environments is essential to the realisation of the full potential of the SG. To address this need for robust, localised, real-time security at the grid edge we propose CONCEDE, a collaborative cross-layer ego-network integrity awareness and attack impact reduction extension to our previous work on delay-tolerant cognitive adaptive energy exchange. We detail a substantial, targeted, energy disruption attack perpetrated by colluding mobile energy prosumers. Our CONCEDE proposal is then evaluated in multiple, diverse smart micro-grid (SMG) scenarios using hybrid traces of EVs and infrastructure from Europe, North America, and South America in the presence of a coordinated attack from malicious distributors seeking to disrupt energy supply to a target community. We show that CONCEDE successfully detects and identifies the nodes exhibiting malicious, dishonest behaviour and that CONCEDE also reduces the impact of a coordinated energy disruption attack on innocent parties in all explored scenarios across multiple criteria

Contextual dishonest behaviour detection for cognitive adaptive charging in dynamic smart micro-grids

The emerging Smart Grid (SG) paradigm promises to address decreasing grid stability from thinning safe operating margins, meet continually rising demand from pervasive high capacity devices such as electric vehicles (EVs), and fully embrace the shift towards green energy solutions. At the SG edge, widespread decentralisation of heterogeneous devices coupled with fluctuating energy availability and need as well as a greatly increased fluidity between their roles as energy producers, consumers, and stores raises significant challenges to ensuring robustness and security of both information and energy exchange. Detecting and mitigating both malicious and non-malicious threats in these environments is essential to the realisation of the full potential of the SG. To address this need for robust, localised, real-time security at the grid edge we propose CONCEDE, a collaborative cross-layer ego-network integrity awareness and attack impact reduction extension to our previous work on delay-tolerant cognitive adaptive energy exchange. We detail a substantial, targeted, energy disruption attack perpetrated by colluding mobile energy prosumers. Our CONCEDE proposal is then evaluated in multiple, diverse smart micro-grid (SMG) scenarios using hybrid traces of EVs and infrastructure from Europe, North America, and South America in the presence of a coordinated attack from malicious distributors seeking to disrupt energy supply to a target community. We show that CONCEDE successfully detects and identifies the nodes exhibiting malicious, dishonest behaviour and that CONCEDE also reduces the impact of a coordinated energy disruption attack on innocent parties in all explored scenarios across multiple criteria

Exploiting Mobile Energy Storages for Overload Mitigation in Smart Grid

The advancement of battery and electronic technologies pushes forward transportation electrification, accelerating the commercialization and prevalence of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The development of PEVs is closely related to the smart grid as PEVs are considered as high power rating electric appliances that require frequent charging. As PEVs become regular transportation options, charging stations (CSs) are also extensively deployed in the smart grid to meet the PEV charging demand. During peak traffic hours, the increasing PEV charging demand could exceed the loading capacities of CS-connected transformers, causing heavy charging overload in-station. Without proper overload mitigation, the energy imbalance issues will result in severe feeder degradation and power quality issue. Therefore, solutions for CS overload mitigation are in urgent demand. Considering the rechargeable nature of PEV batteries, PEVs can serve as potential mobile energy storages (MESs) to carry energy from power nodes with excess energy to overloaded CSs to compensate the overloads. Compared to infrastructure upgrade and installing stationary energy storages at CSs, the utilization of PEVs not only minimizes the additional upgrade/installation expenditure, but also maximizes the energy utilization in the smart grid with high flexibility. However, the PEV utilization for overload mitigation is confronted with a variety of challenges due to vehicular mobility and the fear of battery degradation. Because of vehicular mobility, the CS operation dynamics become stochastic processes, increasing the difficulty of the CS demand estimation. Without accurate demand estimation, the overload condition cannot be timely predicted and controlled. Moreover, the stochastic on-road traffic could impair the time-efficiency of the PEV overload mitigation service. Further, as the overload mitigation service demands frequent charging and discharging, the fear of battery degradation could impede PEV owners from providing the service, making the overload mitigation tasks harder to fulfill. In this thesis, we address the above challenges to effectively utilize PEVs for overload mitigation in the smart grid. In specific, different approaches are designed according to the PEV properties at different commercialization stages. First, at the early PEV commercialization stage, power utility company purchases large battery capacity PEVs as utility-owned MESs (UMESs) whose only responsibility is fulfilling the energy compensation task. The fleet of UMESs is rather small due to the company's limited budget, and therefore UMESs priorly serve the CSs with large energy imbalance (e.g., 500-1000kWh). Thus, the stochastic CS charging demand needs to be accurately estimated and then UMESs can be scheduled to these CSs for overload mitigation. To achieve this objective, we develop a two-dimensional Markov Chain model to characterize the stochastic process in-station so that the CS charging demand can be precisely estimated. Based on the estimated CS demand status, a two-tier energy compensation framework is designed to schedule UMESs to the heavily overloaded CSs in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Second, at the medium stage of PEV commercialization, vehicle-fleet based companies are motivated by legislation to purchase a large fleet of PEVs which can be served as potential MESs, referred to as legislation-motivated MESs (LMESs). To deliver energy to overloaded CSs using LMESs would introduce a large amount of additional traffics to the transportation network. When injecting these LMES traffics into an already busy transportation network, unexpected traffic delay could occur, delaying the overload mitigation service. To avoid the potential traffic delay incurred by LMES service, we develop an energy-capacitated transportation network model to measure the road capacity of accommodating additional LMES traffics. Based on the developed model, a loading-optimized navigation scheme is proposed to calculate the optimal navigation routes for LMES overload mitigation. To stimulate LMESs following the optimal navigation, we propose a dynamic pricing scheme that adjusts the service price to align the LMES service routes with the optimal routes to achieve a time-efficient service result. Third, when PEVs are prevalent in the automobile market and become regular transportation options for every household, on-road private-owned PEVs can be efficiently used as energy porters to deliver energy to overloaded CSs, named as private MESs (PMESs). As the primary objective of PMESs is to reach their planned destinations, the monetary incentive is demanded to stimulate them actively participating in the overload mitigation tasks. Therefore, a hierarchical decision-making process between the utility operator (UO) and PMESs is in demand. Moreover, considering PMESs have different service preferences (e.g., the fear of battery degradation, the unwillingness of long service time, etc.), individual PMES decision making process on the task should be carefully modelled. Thus, we propose to characterize the price-service interaction between the operator and PMESs as a Stackelberg game. The operator acts as the leader to post service price to PMESs while PMESs act as followers, responding to the posted price to maximize their utility functions. In summary, the analysis and schemes proposed in this thesis can be adopted by the local power utility company to utilize PEVs for overload mitigation at overloaded power nodes. The proposed schemes are applicable during different PEV commercialization stage and present PEVs as a flexible solution to the smart grid overload issue

Spatial-temporal domain charging optimization and charging scenario iteration for EV

Environmental problems have become increasingly serious around the world. With lower carbon emissions, Electric Vehicles (EVs) have been utilized on a large scale over the past few years. However, EVs are limited by battery capacity and require frequent charging. Currently, EVs suffer from long charging time and charging congestion. Therefore, EV charging optimization is vital to ensure drivers’ mobility. This study first presents a literature analysis of the current charging modes taxonomy to elucidate the advantages and disadvantages of different charging modes. In specific optimization, under plug-in charging mode, an Urgency First Charging (UFC) scheduling policy is proposed with collaborative optimization of the spatialtemporal domain. The UFC policy allows those EVs with charging urgency to get preempted charging services. As conventional plug-in charging mode is limited by the deployment of Charging Stations (CSs), this study further introduces and optimizes Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) charging. This is aim to maximize the utilization of charging infrastructures and to balance the grid load. This proposed reservation-based V2V charging scheme optimizes pair matching of EVs based on minimized distance. Meanwhile, this V2V scheme allows more EVs get fully charged via minimized waiting time based parking lot allocation. Constrained by shortcomings (rigid location of CSs and slow charging power under V2V converters), a single charging mode can hardly meet a large number of parallel charging requests. Thus, this study further proposes a hybrid charging mode. This mode is to utilize the advantages of plug-in and V2V modes to alleviate the pressure on the grid. Finally, this study addresses the potential problems of EV charging with a view to further optimizing EV charging in subsequent studies

Capacity analysis in different systems exploiting mobility of VANETs

Improving road safety and traffic efficiency has been a long-term endeavor for not only government but also automobile industry and academia. After the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) allocated a 75 MHz spectrum at 5.9 GHz for vehicular communications, the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), as an instantiation of the mobile ad hoc network (MANET) with much higher node mobility, opens a new door to combat the road fatalities. In VANETs, a variety of applications ranging from safety related (e.g. emergency report, collision warning) to non-safety-related (e.g. infotainment and entertainment) can be enabled by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications. However, the flourish of VANET still hinges fully understanding and managing the challenges that the public concerns, for example, capacity and connectivity issues due to the high mobility of vehicles. In this thesis, we investigate how vehicle mobility can impact the performance in three important VANET-involved systems, i.e., pure VANET, VANET-enhanced intelligent transportation systems (ITS), and fast electric vehicle (EV) charging systems. First, in pure VANET, our work shows that the network data-traffic can be balanced and the network throughput can be improved with the help of the vehicle mobility differentiation. Furthermore, leveraging vehicular communications of VANETs, the mobility-aware real-time path planning can be designed to smooth the vehicle traffic in an ITS, through which the traffic congestion in urban scenarios can be effectively relieved. In addition, with the consideration of the range anxiety caused by mobility, coordinated charging can provide efficient charging plans for electric vehicles (EVs) to improve the overall energy utilization while preventing an electric power system from overloading. To this end, we try to answer the following questions: Q1) How to utilize mobility characteristics of vehicles to derive the achievable asymptotic throughput capacity in pure VANETs? Q2) How to design path planning for mobile vehicles to maximize spatial utility based on mobility differentiation, in order to approach vehicle-traffic capacity in a VANET-enhanced ITS? Q3) How to develop the charging strategies based on mobility of electric vehicles to improve the electricity utility, in order to approach load capacities of charging stations in VANET-enhanced smart grid? To achieve the first objective, we consider the unique features of VANETs and derive the scaling law of VANETs throughput capacity in the data uploading scenario. We show that in both free-space propagation and non-free-space propagation environments, the achievable throughput capacity of individual vehicle scales as $\Theta (\frac{1}{{\log n}}) with$n$denoting the population of a set of homogenous vehicles in the network. To achieve the second objective, we first establish a VANET-enhanced ITS, which incorporates VANETs to enable real-time communications among vehicles, road side units (RSUs), and a vehicle-traffic server in an efficient way. Then, we propose a real-time path planning algorithm, which not only improves the overall spatial utilization of a road network but also reduces average vehicle travel cost for avoiding vehicles from getting stuck in congestion. To achieve the third objective, we investigate a smart grid involved EV fast charging system, with enhanced communication capabilities, i.e., a VANET-enhanced smart grid. It exploits VANETs to support real-time communications among RSUs and highly mobile EVs for real-time vehicle mobility information collection or charging decision dispatch. Then, we propose a mobility-aware coordinated charging strategy for EVs, which not only improves the overall energy utilization while avoiding power system overloading, but also addresses the range anxieties of individual EVs by reducing the average travel cost. In summary, the analysis developed and the scaling law derived in$Q1$of this thesis is practical and fundamental to reveal the relationship between the mobility of vehicles and the network performance in VANETs. And the strategies proposed in$Q2$and$Q3$ of the thesis are meaningful in exploiting/leveraging the vehicle mobility differentiation to improve the system performance in order to approach the corresponding capacities

Towards Holistic Charging Management for Urban Electric Taxi via a Hybrid Deployment of Battery Charging and Swap Stations

While previous studies focused on managing charging demand for private electric vehicles (EVs), we investigate ways of supporting the upgrade of an entire public urban electric taxi (ET) system. Concerning the coexistence of plugin charging stations (CSs) and battery swap stations (BSSs) in practice, it thus requires further efforts to design a holistic charging management especially for ETs. By jointly considering the combination of plug-in charging and battery swapping, a hybrid charging management framework is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme is capable of guiding ETs to appropriate stations with time-varying requirements depending on how emergent the demand will be. Through the selection of battery charging/swap, the optimization goal is to reduce the trip delay of ET. Results under a Helsinki city scenario with realistic ETs and charging stations show the effectiveness of our enabling technology, in terms of minimized drivers’ trip duration, as well as charging performance gains at the ET and station sides

Planning and Design for Intelligent and Secure Integration of Electric Vehicles into the Smart Grid

The transition to electric vehicles (EVs) is gaining momentum around the world and government initiatives to accelerate this transition range from major tax exemptions, lower insurance payments to convenient parking incentives at shopping malls. The major drivers for this acceleration are the rising awareness by the public for maintaining a clean environment, reducing pollutant emissions, breaking dependencies on oil, as well as tapping into cleaner sources of energies. EVs acceptance however is hindered by several challenges; among them is their shorter driving range, slower charging rates, and the ubiquitous availability of charging locations, collectively contributing to higher anxieties for EVs drivers. Governments of developed countries as well as major car manufacturers are taking solid steps to address these challenges and set ambitious goals to make EVs the major transportation mode within few years. Consequently, a significant number of EVs is going to connect to the existing smart grid and hence, the load pattern is expecting a paradigm shift. This immense load will challenge the generation, transmission and distribution sector of the grid along with being a potential cyber-physical attack platform. To attain a graceful EV penetration for curtailing GHG emission, along with the socioeconomic initiatives, an extensive research is required, especially to mitigate the range anxiety and ameliorate the load congestion on the grid. As a consequence, to reduce the range anxiety, we present a two-stage solution to provision and dimension a DC fast charging station (CS) network for the anticipated energy demand and that minimizes the deployment cost while ensuring a certain quality of experience for charging e.g., acceptable waiting times and shorter travel distances to charge. This solution also maintains the voltage stability by considering the distribution grid capacity, determining transformers’ rating to support peak demand of EV charging and adding a minimum number of voltage regulators based on the impact over the power distribution network. We propose, evaluate and compare two CS network expansion models to determine a cost-effective and adaptive CSs provisioning solution that can efficiently expand the CS network to accommodate future EV charging and conventional load demands. Though an adequate fast charging network may assist to reduce the range anxiety and propel the EV market, catering this large number of EVs using fuel based conventional grid actually shifts the carbon footprint from the transportation sector to the power generation sector. As a consequence, green energy needs to be promoted for EV charging. However, the intermittent behavior of renewable energy (RE) generation challenges to maintain a RE based stand alone CS. In order to address this issue, we consider a photovoltaic(PV) powered station equipped with an energy storage system (ESS), which is assumed to be capable of assigning variable charging rates to different EVs to fulfill their demands inside their declared deadlines at minimum price. To ensure fairness, a charging rate dependent pricing mechanism is proposed to assure a higher price for enjoying a higher charging rate. The PV generation profile and future load request are forecasted at each time slot, to handle the respective uncertainties. Whatever, the energy source is green or not of a CS, a static CS cannot offer the flexibility to charge an EV at any place at any time especially for an emergency case. Fortunately, the bidirectional energy transferring capability between vehicles (i.e., vehicle to vehicle (V2V)) might be a solution to charge an EV at any place and at any time without leaning on a stationary CS. Hence, we assume a market where charging providers each has a number of charging trucks equipped with a larger battery and a fast charger to charge a number of EVs at some particular parking lots. We formulate an integer linear program (ILP) to maximize the number of served EVs by determining the optimal trajectory and schedule of each truck. Owing to its complexity, we implement Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition approach to solve this. However, to build a prolific EV charging ecosystem, all its entities (e.g., EVs, CSs and grid) have to be connected through a communication link and that unveils a new cyber physical attack surface. As a consequence, we exploit the abundance of Electric Vehicles (EVs) to target the stability of the power grid by presenting a realistic coordinated switching attack that initiates inter-area oscillations between different areas of the power grid and assess the dire consequences over the power system. Finally, a back propagation neural network (BPNN) technique is used in a proposed framework to detect such switching attacks before being executed