Electric Vehicle Charging: A Noncooperative Game Using Local Measurements

Abstract A distributed control algorithm is proposed to manage the electrical power demand for the purpose of charging electric vehicles so that (a) the overall power demand remains within the limitations of the distribution network and (b) each vehicle obtains a sufficiently charged battery at the end of the charging cycle. The charging algorithm utilises only local measurements to determine the charge current. The control problem is modelled as a non-cooperative game with weakly coupled cost functions for each vehicle. The cost function for each vehicle consist of an individual cost term and a group cost term. The group cost term expresses the aggregated demand of all vehicles and serves the purpose of ensuring that the infrastructure capacity constraints are respected. It is shown that this term can be estimated from local voltage measurements. The individual cost term reflects the need to achieve a desired charge level in the battery. Sufficient conditions for the overall system to admit a unique Nash Equilibrium are identified. Convergence and stability properties for a particular greedy algorithm implementation are described. To illustrate the efficacy of the proposed charging methodology, the algorithm is simulated in the context of an Australian suburban low voltage electricity distribution network.

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