Distributed Electric Vehicles Charging Management with Social Contribution Concept

This article proposes a charging management of electric vehicles (EVs) with a newly presented EV social contribution. The EV charging problem is represented by a generalized Nash equilibrium game where each individual EV tries to minimize its charging cost while satisfying its own charging requirements and respecting the charging facility constraints. The individual EV features a social behavior to potentially contribute in shifting its charging schedule from specific intervals that have insufficient charging power. This shift in the EV schedule will allow more charging power to other EVs that admit stricter charging requirements, i.e., intervals and demands. In this way, the contributed EVs socially help others in reducing their charging costs, which is particularly important during the overload cases in the system. The proposed solution is reached iteratively in a distributed way utilizing the consensus network and found based on the receding horizon optimization framework. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed social contribution in the charging management for reducing the charging cost of EVs.