Deploying power grid-integrated electric vehicles as a multi-agent system

Grid-Integrated Vehicles (GIVs) are plug-in Electric Drive Vehicles (EDVs) with power-management and other controls that allow them to respond to external commands sent by power-grid operators, or their affiliates, when parked and plugged-in to the grid. At a bare minimum, such GIVs should respond to demand-management commands or pricing signals to delay, reduce or switch-off the rate of charging when the demand for electricity is high. In more advanced cases, these GIVs might sell both power and storage capacity back to the grid in any of the several electric power markets — a concept known as Vehicle-to-Grid power or V2G power. Although individual EDVs control too little power to sell in the market at an individual level, a large group of EDVs may form an aggregate or coalition that controls enough power to meaningfully sell, at a profit, in these markets. The profits made by such a coalition can then be used by the coalition members to offset the costs of the electric vehicles and batteries themselves. In this paper we describe an implemented and deployed multi-agent system that is used to integrate EDVs into the electricity grid managed by PJM, the largest transmission service operator in the world. We provide a brief introduction to GIVs and the various power markets and discuss why multi-agent systems are a good match for this application.