In this thesis, we mainly discuss four topics on Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the context of
smart grid and smart transportation systems.
The first topic focuses on investigating the impacts of different EV charging strategies on
the grid. In Chapter 3, we present a mathematical framework for formulating different EV
charging problems and investigate a range of typical EV charging strategies with respect to
different actors in the power system. Using this framework, we compare the performances of
all charging strategies on a common power system simulation testbed, highlighting in each
case positive and negative characteristics.
The second topic is concerned with the applications of EVs with Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G)
capabilities. In Chapter 4, we apply certain ideas from cooperative control techniques to
two V2G applications in different scenarios. In the first scenario, we harness the power
of V2G technologies to reduce current imbalance in a three-phase power network. In the
second scenario, we design a fair V2G programme to optimally determine the power dispatch
from EVs in a microgrid scenario. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms are verified
through a variety of simulation studies.
The third topic discusses an optimal distributed energy management strategy for power
generation in a microgrid scenario. In Chapter 5, we adapt the synchronised version of the
Additive-Increase-Multiplicative-Decrease (AIMD) algorithms to minimise a cost utility
function related to the power generation costs of distributed resources. We investigate the
AIMD based strategy through simulation studies and we illustrate that the performance of
the proposed method is very close to the full communication centralised case. Finally, we
show that this idea can be easily extended to another application including thermal balancing
requirements.
The last topic focuses on a new design of the Speed Advisory System (SAS) for optimising
both conventional and electric vehicles networks. In Chapter 6, we demonstrate that, by
using simple ideas, one can design an effective SAS for electric vehicles to minimise group
energy consumption in a distributed and privacy-aware manner; Matlab simulation are give
to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach. Further, we extend this idea to conventional
vehicles in Chapter 7 and we show that by using some of the ideas introduced in Chapter
6, group emissions of conventional vehicles can also be minimised under the same SAS
framework. SUMO simulation and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) tests involving real vehicles
are given to illustrate user acceptability and ease of deployment.
Finally, note that many applications in this thesis are based on the theories of a class
of nonlinear iterative feedback systems. For completeness, we present a rigorous proof on
global convergence of consensus of such systems in Chapter 2
