Distributed control of electric vehicle fleets considering grid congestion and battery degradation

Abstract

Nowadays, developing coordinated optimal charging strategies for large‐scale electric vehicle (EV) fleets is crucial to ensure the reliability and efficiency of power grids. This paper presents a novel fully distributed control strategy for the optimal charging of large‐scale EV fleets aiming at the minimization of the aggregated charging cost and battery degradation, while satisfying the EVs' individual load requirements and the overall grid congestion limits. We formulate the optimization problem as a convex quadratic programming problem where all the EVs' decisions are coupled both via the objective function and some grid resource sharing constraints. Based on the distributed waterfilling approach, the proposed resolution algorithm requires a minimal shared information between EVs that communicate only with their neighbors without relying on a central aggregator, thus guaranteeing the EV users' privacy. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated through numerical experiments to validate its effectiveness in achieving a global optimum while respecting the grid constraints with a favorable computational efficiency.