A cooperative aggregation-based architecture for vehicle-to-grid communications

In the future Intelligent Transportation Systems, vehicles will be equipped with special units giving them the capacity to communicate wirelessly. Furthermore, electric vehicles are expected to take a bigger part of the market in the future. Global preoccupations to reduce carbon emissions and stimulate the use of renewable and sustainable energies have motivated the concept of vehicle-to-grid power, which integrates the electric vehicles within the smart grid (the electricity network of the future). The vehicle-to-grid vision aims to take advantage of these battery equipped vehicles, using them as a storage device for intermittent energy sources, and as a power resource to provide ancillary services to the power grid. This paper focuses on the architectural needs of such a system, specifically at the communications level. It also presents an agent-based model for an aggregative system for vehicle-to-grid communications. The agent-based approach will allow the distributed architecture to benefit from a variety of well-established communication and cooperation mechanisms and methods that can be applied to the vehicle-to-grid concept.