Investigation of an Optimal Charging/Discharging Policy for Electric Vehicles Parking Station in a Smart Grid Environment

摘要

The world is shifting from conventional vehicles to Electric Vehicles (EVs) since their operation has a low cost and is environmentally friendly. However, there are various obstacles affecting EVs development, such as the vehicle range, charging process and infrastructure, etc. This paper focuses on the charging infrastructure of EVs investigating their optimal charging cycles in a Smart-Grid environment in order to improve the profitability of charging stations and decrease the high energy demand from the grid. Accordingly, a charging station was studied equipped with Photo-voltaic rooftop allowing vehicles to sell energy to the grid forming a Vehicle-to-Grid strategy. A priority-based algorithm was implemented to schedule EVs charging/discharging. Two optimization techniques; Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA), were used to optimize the installation and operation of the station to maximize the station’s profit. Accordingly, several cases were studied to analyze the influence of the mentioned capabilities. The results revealed that the maximum parking profit was obtained by utilizing the photo-voltaic rooftop with vehicle-to-Grid capability. Moreover, the performance of the two optimization techniques is compared showing similar results regarding the optimization effectiveness. However, GA takes longer computational time.