Optimal Management of Energy Communities Hosting a Fleet of Electric Vehicles

In this paper, we study the problem of managing an energy community hosting a fleet of electric vehicles for rent. On the day ahead, service requests for electric vehicles are submitted to the community. Then, the optimal request-to-vehicle assignment has to be found, as well as the optimal charging schedule of vehicle batteries. A suitable model is presented and included in an existing energy community architecture. The overall community management problem is formulated as a bi-level model, featuring two nested optimization problems. The optimal request-to-vehicle assignment requires the solution of a mixed-integer linear program. To reduce the computational complexity, a heuristic solution to the assignment problem is presented. Numerical results show that participation in the community grants a remarkable reduction in the electric vehicle charging cost. The adoption of the heuristic assignment solution provides a dramatic reduction in the computation time required to solve the bi-level model. At the same time, the level of suboptimality introduced appears to be negligible, being less than 1% in most of the considered cases.