Electric vehicle charging under power and balance constraints as dynamic scheduling

Abstract

Scheduling appropriately the charging times for a set of electric vehicles may lead to energy savings but at the same time it may be a hard problem. In this paper, we consider a problem of this family, which is motivated by a private community park where each parking space belongs to a particular user and has a charging point connected to one line of a three-phase electric feeder. The number of vehicles in each line and the difference in the vehicles in every pair of lines charging at the same time are limited. We model this problem in the framework of Dynamic Constraint Satisfaction Problems (DCSP) with optimization, and so it is defined by a sequence of CSPs over time. We propose a solution method that decomposes each CSP into three instances of a one machine sequencing problem with variable capacity. This method was evaluated by simulation on a set of instances defined from different scenarios of vehicle arrivals, departures and energy requirements. The results of the experimental study show clearly that the proposed algorithm is efficient and that it outperforms a classic dispatching rule.