A Priority Index Method for Efficient Charging of PEVs in a Charging Station with Constrained Power Consumption

The sizable electrical load of plug-in electric vehicles may cause a severe low-voltage problem in a distribution network. The voltage drop in a distribution network can be mitigated by limiting the power consumption of a charging station. Then, the charging station operator needs a method for appropriately distributing the restricted power to all plug-in electric vehicles. The existing approaches have practical limitation in terms of the availability of future information and the execution time. Therefore, this study suggests a heuristic method based on priority indexes for fairly distributing the constrained power to all plug-in electric vehicles. In the proposed method, PEVs are ranked using the priority index, which is determined in real time, such that a near-optimal solution can be obtained within a short computation time. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in implementation, although its performance is slightly worse than that of the optimal case.