GreenBroker: Optimal Electric Vehicle Park-and-Charge Control via Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication

The increasing market share of electric vehicles (EVs) makes charging facilities indispensable infrastructure for integrating EVs into the future smart grid. The promising facility called park-and-charge station was recently proposed. Existing studies on park-and-charge station mainly focus on managing the charging distribution of onsite EVs, ignoring the impacts of offsite EVs in the region. In this paper, we fill this gap by leveraging the emerging vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technique to manage the charging schedule of both onsite and offsite EVs. Specifically, we design a park-and-charge management system, GreenBroker, which allows park-and-charge stations to control the arriving rate by sending real-time prices to EVs via V2I communications, and to control the charging rate via real-time electricity state. We develop a two-timescale stochastic optimization model, maximizing the revenue of park-and-charge stations while ensuring a finite charging delay of EV users. We derive the worst-case charging delay of EVs and show that it provides an [O(1/V), O(V)] tradeoff between the revenue of charging stations and the worst-case delay of EV users. We also demonstrate the efficacy of GreenBroker via trace-data simulation.