Decentralized Charging Control of Large Populations of Plug-in Electric Vehicles

This paper develops a strategy to coordinate the charging of autonomous plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) using concepts from non-cooperative games. The foundation of the paper is a model that assumes PEVs are cost-minimizing and weakly coupled via a common electricity price. At a Nash equilibrium, each PEV reacts optimally with respect to a commonly observed charging trajectory that is the average of all PEV strategies. This average is given by the solution of a fixed point problem in the limit of infinite population size. The ideal solution minimizes electricity generation costs by scheduling PEV demand to fill the overnight non-PEV demand “valley”. The paper's central theoretical result is a proof of the…