Optimal Charging Schedule for Electric Vehicles in Parking Lot with Solar Power Generation

Abstract

In order to reduce the carbon emission from vehicles, the world transportation system is transforming from conventional gasoline vehicles to electric vehicles. This transformation introduced high penetration of electric vehicles into the utility grid. This lead to a new scope of research in the area of scheduling the charging of electric vehicles. In this context the electric vehicles arriving at the parking lot is increasing which leads a challenge to parking lot owner for scheduling of vehicles for charging. The primary objective of parking lot owner is to charge more vehicles and increase his profit. But due to stringent rules from regulators for network upgrades, increase in the number of charging slots is challenging. Installing a distributed generation like solar microgrid will benefit from allowing many vehicles to charge at the parking lot. This paper aims in proposing an algorithm called parking lot management system (PLMS) for optimal scheduling of electric vehicles with the support of solar generation with the objective of minimizinz the power drawl from the grid during high peak pricing period. Power drawl from the grid is reduced by using the solar power available. Since the power drawl from the grid is reduced, it is obvious that the profit of the parking lot owner is increased. Optimal scheduling is done by shifting the cars to the abundant solar power period and reducing the peaks on the grid which helps the utility operator. The proposed algorithm is simulated using MATLAB programming, and the results are presented. Here in the simulation, it is considered two cases one is the uncoordinated case, and the other is coordinated case. In uncoordinated case charging strategy is first come first served (FCFS) basis and in coordinated case scheduling is done by shifting of cars to abundant solar periods for reducing the cost. It is observed from the results that the savings with solar installation and the uncoordinated case is ₹2729.59 and whereas with the coordinated case the savings are ₹2891.19 for one day. Since the savings are more in coordinated case, it is suggested that coordinated scheduling of vehicles will increase the profit of the parking lot owner.