Real-Time Pricing and Decentralized Optimization Strategy for Power Flow Balancing in EV/PHV Storage Management

Abstract

This chapter investigates a decentralized energy management strategy for the community consisting of households equipped with EV storage. We consider the power flow balancing between a prediction-based power supply and the actual demand of the community. Each agent, i.e., a household, is allowed to determine its own storage charging or discharging set-point. Meanwhile, the utility, which is an independent entity and corresponds to the management office of the community, attempts to realize a socially optimal solution that enables steady-state power flow balance. To align the individual decision-making of each agent with the socially optimal solution, the utility is allowed to provide an additional price, which conceptually represents a tax or subsidy for the agents. The proposed real-time pricing strategy does not depend on the number of agents, and it allows plug-and-play type operations. This conforms to the EV storage management problem, since unpredictable connections or disconnections of the vehicles may occur. The effectiveness of the proposed pricing-based decentralized management strategy is evaluated by numerical experiments.