Congestion Management for Urban EV Charging Systems

E. Rigas, S. Ramchurn, N. Bassiliades, G. Koutitas, “Congestion Management for Urban EV Charging Systems”, 4th IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm 2013), IEEE, Vancouver, Canada, 21-24 Oct 2013, 2013.

We consider the problem of managing Electric Vehicle (EV) charging at charging points in a city to ensure that the load on the charging points remains within the desired limits while minimizing the inconvenience to EV owners.We develop solutions that treat charging points and EV users as self-interested agents that aim to maximize their profit and minimize the impact on their schedule. In particular, we propose variants of a decentralised and dynamic approach as well as an optimal centralised static approach. We evaluated these solutions in a real setting based on the road network and the location of parking garages of a UK city and show that the optimal centralised (nondynamic) solution manages the congestion the best but does not scale well, while the decentralised solutions scale to thousands of agents.