Coordinated pricing mechanism for parking clusters considering interval-guided uncertainty-aware strategies

Abstract

With the increasing penetration of electric vehicles into the existing power networks, the development of proper energy management tools become essential to mitigate the damaging effects of emerging high-power charging modes. To facilitate the management of vehicles, they can be gathered into clusters in order to aggregate their charging profiles. This paradigm is called cluster of vehicles and can be forward developed by gathering a group of parking, thus forming a parking cluster where the characteristics of different parking lots are aggregated. In this paper, a coordinated charging price mechanism for clusters of parking lots is proposed. The new proposal is casted as a game-based framework which seeks for the equilibrium between the cluster coordinator and parking lots, instead of conventional tools where the pricing strategy is decided by a central entity disregarding the interests of users. The developed model is established as a bi-level optimization problem, which is further linearized to be tractable and solvable by off-the-shelf solvers. The implications of vehicle-to-grid are also studied by fully modelling bi-directional power flows in chargers. In addition, two uncertainty-aware strategies are proposed to cope with uncertain energy margins in parking lots. A case study is conducted and various results are analysed and discussed. It is shown that enabling vehicle-to-grid characteristics discloses significant economic benefits for users and the cluster coordinator. In addition, vehicle-to-grid impacts notably on the risk-averse character of the uncertainty-aware strategies proposed. The developed pricing mechanism is also compared with the conventional pricing policies based on key of repartitions, showing that the new proposal is able to reduce the cost for users, avoiding to directly translate the energy cost to charging points.