A Distributed Charging Coordination for Large-Scale Plug-In Electric Vehicles Considering Battery Degradation Cost

Much research has focused on the issue of how to effectively coordinate the charging behaviors of large-scale plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), like the valley-fill strategy, to minimize their impacts on the power grid. However, high charging rates under the valley-fill strategy may result in a higher battery degradation cost. Consequently, in this brief, we formulate a class of PEV charging coordination problems that deal with the tradeoff between the total generation cost and the accumulated battery degradation cost of PEV populations. Due to the autonomy of individual PEVs and the computational complexity of the system with large-scale PEVs, it is impractical to implement the solution in a centralized way. Alternatively, in this brief, we propose a distributed method such that all of the individual PEVs simultaneously update their own best charging behaviors with respect to a common electricity price curve, which is updated as the generation marginal cost with respect to the aggregated charging behaviors of the PEV populations implemented at the last step. The iteration procedure terminates in case the price curve does not update any longer. We show that by applying the proposed distributed method and under certain mild conditions, the system can converge to a unique charging strategy, which is nearly socially optimal. Simulation examples are studied to illustrate the results developed in this brief.