Comparison between inflexible and flexible charging of electric vehicles–from the perspective of an aggregator

Abstract

This paper is about the problem of the management of an aggregator of electric vehicles participating in an electricity market environment. The problem consists in the maximization of the expected profit through a formulation given by a stochastic programming problem to consider the uncertainty faced by the aggregator. This uncertainty is due to the day-ahead market prices and the driving requirements of the owners of the vehicles. Driving requirements considered are from inflexibility to flexibility, depending on the consent of the owners. Thus, the aggregator can propose different profiles and charging periods to the owners of electric vehicles. Qualitatively, as expected, the more flexible is the vehicle owners, the high is the expected profit. But the formulation offers more to the aggregator, gives the ability to quantify the influence of consent of favorable driving requirements in the expected profit, allowing the aggregator to consider rewarding proposes to the owners of vehicles with more flexibility. Case studies addressed are for comparison of the influence of owners having inflexibility, partially flexibility, or flexibility in the expected profit of the aggregator.