Bang-Bang Charging of Electrical Vehicles by Smart Grid Technology.

The success of transportation electrification in this century is critically dependent on the penetration of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) into power grids. Massive integration of PEVs into a power grid potentially gives rise to its operating fluctuation, which is not easily controlled due to the unavailability of the PEVs' power demand profiles prior to their random connections to the grid. The present paper considers the problem of joint coordination of PEV charging and grid power control to minimize both PEV charging cost and energy generation cost in meeting both residential and PEVs' power demands and suppressing the potential impact of PEV integration. A bang-bang PEV charging strategy is adopted to exploit its simple online implementation. Based on a recently developed model predictive control technique, a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem (MINP) in binary variables of the PEV charging strategy and continuous variables of the grid voltages is proposed at each time for implementing an online algorithm. A major contribution of the paper is to develop a new solver for this MINP. Its capacity for achieving an optimal solution is shown by numerical examples.