Utility maximization for Electric Vehicle charging with admission control and scheduling

How to coordinate multiple Electric Vehicles' (EVs) charging demands to satisfy the requirements of the customers and also maximize the profit for the charging station is an important and challenging problem. Most of the existing works mainly focus on the interest of one side. In this paper, we develop a utility based multi-charger framework to ensure a win-win situation for both the customers and the charging station. We first propose an admission control algorithm to guarantee that the non-flexible charging requirements of all admitted EVs can be satisfied before their departure time. Then, we encourage all EVs to take more charging flexibility by setting an attractive price for the additional electricity to be taken by the EVs. To maximize the profit of the charging station, a utility based charging scheduling algorithm is proposed. Extensive simulations based on practical EV charging information have been conducted, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The results show that the proposed approach can outperform the state-of-the-art one in terms of total utility, so that the charging station can enjoy a higher profit and the customers can enjoy more cost savings.