Optimal Charging/Discharging Control Service for Electric Vehicles: A Case Study at University Campus

In the past few years, environmental issues have got much attention due to their adverse effects. Many governments have been providing subsidies to those who promote and utilize environment-friendly resources. Therefore, electric vehicles (EVs) have gained the significant attention and are becoming ubiquitous. However, it is a challenge for EV owners to charge their vehicles at homes unless they have enough space and proper charging arrangements. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to offer a service of workplace charging to the faculty, staff, and students at the university campus. It is considered that a distributed generator (DG) unit is being utilized by the campus along with the grid connection where the electric grid follows the time-of-use tariff. The building load is calculated based on the schedule of faculty, staff, and students as it mainly consists of the loads of offices, laboratories, and lecture rooms. The proposed approach minimizes the overall operational cost of the system by adjusting the EVs charging and discharging patterns and rates. It is important to note that the proposed methodology meets all the system as well as the EV users' constraints. Most importantly, it meets the target state-of-charge (SOC) requirement of each EV user. Simulation results show that the proposed approach helps all the EV users to charge their EVs to a desired level at a reasonable price while meeting the system overall load requirements.