Decentralised online charging scheduling for large populations of electric vehicles: a cyber-physical system approach

As the number of electric vehicles (EVs) grows, their electricity demands may have significant detrimental impacts on electric power grid when not scheduled properly. In this paper, we model an EV charging system as a cyber-physical system, and design a decentralised online EV charging scheduling algorithm for large populations of EVs, where the EVs can be highly heterogeneous and may join the charging system dynamically. The algorithm couples a clustering-based strategy that dynamically classifies heterogeneous EVs into multiple groups and a sliding-window iterative approach that schedules the charging demand for the EVs in each group in real time. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our approach provides near-optimal solutions at significantly reduced complexity and communication overhead. It flattens the aggregated load on the power grid and reduces the costs of both the users and the utility.