Towards an Agent-based Negotiation Scheme for Scheduling Electric Vehicle Charging

A. Seitaridis, E. Rigas, N. Bassiliades, S. Ramchurn, “Towards an Agent-based Negotiation Scheme for Scheduling Electric Vehicles Charging”, Proc. 13th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2015), Athens, 17-18 December 2015, LNAI 9571, Springer, pp. 157-171, 2016.

We consider the problem of scheduling Electric Vehicle (EV) charging within a single charging station aiming to maximize the number of charged EVs, as well as the amount of charged energy. In so doing, we propose one online optimal solution using Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) techniques, and two online solutions which incrementally execute the MIP algorithm each time an EV arrives to the charging station. Moreover, we apply agent-based negotiation techniques between the station and the EVs in order to service EVs when the MIP problem is initially unsolvable due to insufficient resources (i.e., requested energy, charging time window). We evaluate our solutions in a setting partially using real data, and we show that when applying negotiation techniques, the number of EVs charged increases on average by 7%, energy utilization by 6:5%, while there is only a small deficit (about 10%) on average agent utility which is unavoidable due to the fact that the initial incremental demand-response problem is unsolvable.