Electricity Trading Agent for EV-enabled Parking Lots

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is seen as an important step towards environmental sustainability. Perhaps not surprising, many governments all around the world are providing incentives for consumers to buy electric vehicles (EVs). A positive response from consumers means that the demand for the charging infrastructure increases as well. We investigate how an existing traditional parking lot, upgraded with chargers, can suit the present demand for charging stations. In particular, a resulting EV-enabled parking lot is an electricity trading agent (i.e., broker) which acts as an energy retailer and as a player on a target electricity market. In this paper, we use agent-based simulation to present the EV-enabled parking lot ecosystem in order to model the underlying dynamics and uncertainties regarding parking lots with electricity trading agent functionalities. We instantiate our agent-based simulations using real-life data in order to perform the what-if analysis. Several key performance indicators (KPIs), including parking utilization, charging utilization and electricity utilization, are proposed. We also illustrate how those KPIs can be used to choose the effective investment strategy with respect to the number and speed of chargers.