Agent-based coordination for charging electric vehicles

Abstract

Charging electric vehicles, connected to the distribution grid, may cause unwanted peak power consumption. As controllable loads, they form an attractive target for active demand response, by modulating, delaying or accelerating the charging of the vehicles. As such, this can be used to balance power from renewables, to shave peaks or to spread consumption more evenly, or to minimise energy costs. Such control actions need to take dynamically varying constraints into account, concerning arrivals and departure times, grid capacity, power consumption, green electricity generation, etc. Hence a multi-objective optimisation problem needs to be solved, in order to optimise for the different criteria. By incorporating predicted trends for loads, better results can be obtained than when only considering the current situation. Agent-based decentralised and hierarchic coordination mechanisms provide such functionality in a scalable yet robust way. Modular implementation allows flexibility.