Joint Routing and Charging Scheduling Optimizations for Smart-Grid Enabled Electric Vehicle Networks

Abstract

The massive integration of electric vehicles (EVs) will pose great challenges to the stability and efficiency of both the conventional power networks and transportation systems. The recently emerging smart grid technology, which integrates advanced communication, control, and charging infrastructures, provides promising solutions to tackle these challenges. In this paper, we consider a smart-grid enabled EV network with heterogeneous charging facilities of different charging costs and capabilities, e.g., allowing EV to sell energy back to the grid. In this case, an EV user needs to decide which path to take, and where and how much to charge/discharge its battery at charging stations in the chosen path such that its journey can be accomplished with the minimum monetary cost. From the system operator's perspective, we study a joint optimization of the routing selection and charging schedules to maximize the overall consumer surplus of a set of EVs. To reduce the computational complexity of the system operator and signaling exchange, we propose a distributed scheme such that each user can maximize its own profit, and the system operator can also achieve the maximum consumer surplus through limited signaling exchange with the EV users. Our simulation shows that the proposed algorithm could efficiently save energy cost of the users and improve the usage of renewable energy in the power network.