Decentralized Charging Coordination of Electric Vehicles Under Feeder Capacity Constraints

As an envisioned technology for future smart city networks, this article studies the real-time decentralized charging coordination of a fleet of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) under feeder capacity constraints. In particular, inspired by some ideas in the field of population games and payoff dynamics models, we propose a novel form of continuous-time primal-dual gradient dynamics and develop a real-time control method for the charging coordination of PEVs in smart city networks. The proposed method is able to coordinate the charging profiles of multiple PEVs in a decentralized fashion under a general convex optimization objective, and guarantees the satisfaction of the operational constraints of the PEVs and the feeder lines of the distribution network for all times. The optimality and asymptotic stability of the proposed dynamics are formally proven, and the advantages of the proposed method are illustrated through numerical simulations considering a fleet with several PEVs.