Multi-Period Coordinated Management of Electric Vehicles in Zonal Power Markets: A Convex Relaxation Approach

Abstract: In recent years, developments in plug in hybrid electric vehicles have provided various environmental and economic advantages. In the future smart grids, electric vehicles are seen as an important means of transportation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One of the main issues regarding to this sort of vehicles is managing their charging time to prevent high peak loads over time. Deploying advanced metering and automatic chargers can be a practical way not only for the vehicle owners to manage their energy consumption, but also for the utilities to manage the electricity load during the day by shifting the charging loads to the off-peak periods. Additionally, an efficient charging schedule can reduce the user's electricity bill cost. In this paper we propose a new coordinated multi-period management model for electric vehicles charging scheduling based on multi-objective approach, aiming at optimizing customers charging cost. In the proposed method, a stochastic model is given for starting time of charging, which makes the method a practical tool for simulating the vehicle owners charging behavior effectively. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, two market policies are used as case studies. The computation results can be used to evaluate the impact of electric vehicles scheduling on economic performance of smart grid.