Urgency-Driven, Plug-In Electric Vehicle Charging

In this work, we propose a strategy for managing the charging of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) that simultaneously avoids overloads and provides demand-based allocation of power distribution resources. The strategy leverages (1) a 'power packet' approach which allocates charging for finite lengths of time and (2) a locally defined automaton where a user's 'urgency' sets the request rate for charging. The charge management strategy requires very little communications between the PEV charger and the power distribution system. Furthermore, the system's charge manager is blind to which PEV is making the request thereby ensuring fairness and privacy. The work details possible implementations of the approach and illustrates the methodology through simulations.