Smart Grid Solution for Charging and Discharging Services Based on Cloud Computing Scheduling

Abstract

Smart Grid (SG) technology represents an unprecedented opportunity to transfer the energy industry into a new era of reliability, availability, and efficiency that will contribute to our economic and environmental health. On the other hand, the emergence of electric vehicles (EVs) promises to yield multiple benefits to both power and transportation industry sectors, but it is also likely to affect the SG reliability, by consuming massive energy. Nevertheless, the plug-in of EVs at public supply stations must be controlled and scheduled in order to reduce the peak load. This paper considers the problem of plug-in EVs at public supply stations (EVPSS). A new communication architecture for SG and cloud services is introduced. Scheduling algorithms are proposed in order to attribute priority levels and optimize the waiting time to plug-in at each EVPSS. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first papers investigating the aforementioned issues using new network architecture for SG based on cloud computing. We evaluate our approach via extensive simulations and compare it with two other recently proposed works, based on real supply energy scenario in Toronto. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach when considering real EVs charging–discharging loads at peak-hours period.