Online energy management for data centers and electric vehicles in smart grid environment

To avoid an additional demand charge incurred by the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), we study an online cost minimization problem for geo-distributed data centers and EVs of their employees without violating heterogeneous EV charging delays and the given peak power limits in all geographical locations, where the total cost consists of the electricity bill, revenue loss, and the penalty imposed on unfinished EV demands. We first formulate a stochastic programming problem with the considerations of uncertainties in data center workloads, electricity prices, and EV energy demands. Since the future parameters are uncertain, an online algorithm is proposed to solve the formulated problem. Moreover, the performance analysis of the online algorithm is conducted. Simulation results indicate the advantages of the proposed algorithm over other baselines.