Online charging coordination of electric vehicles to optimize cost and smoothness

Abstract A large number of electric vehicles (EVs) operating in cities result in huge charging demands. For a charging station, it is important to balance between the charging cost and the future maintenance cost. In this paper, we present two bi-objective optimization models for optimizing charging cost and maintenance cost. From the perspective of maintenance cost, we consider to smooth the charging rate of the whole charging station and the charging rate of each charging port. Based on the two optimization models, we propose two heuristic online charging coordination algorithms called OCC-CSS (Cost and Station Smooth) and OCC-CPS (Cost and Port Smooth) to schedule the charging rate of EVs respectively. To evaluate their effectiveness, a series of simulations are conducted based on a real-world charging dataset of EVs. The results show that the two algorithms can achieve a nice trade-off between cost and smoothness, while keeping the ratio of service rejection near zero. Meanwhile, OCC-CPS achieves a better trade-off between cost and smoothness than OCC-CSS.