Offline and online scheduling of electric vehicle charging with a minimum charging threshold

The increasing penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) requires the development of smart charging strategies that accommodate the increasing load of these EVs on the distribution grid. Many existing charging strategies assume that an EV is allowed to charge at any rate up to a given maximum rate. However, in practice, charging at low rates is inefficient and often even impossible. Therefore, this paper presents an efficient algorithm for scheduling an EV within a decentralized energy management system that allows only charging above a given threshold. We show that the resulting optimal EV schedule is characterized by an activation level and a fill-level. Moreover, based on this result, we derive an online approach that does not require predictions of uncontrollable loads as input, but merely a prediction of these two characterizing values. Simulation results show that the online algorithm is robust against prediction errors in these values and can produce near-optimal online solutions.