Decentralized coordination of plug-in hybrid vehicles for imbalance reduction in a smart grid

Intelligent electricity grids, or ‘Smart Grids’, are being introduced at a rapid pace. Smart grids allow the management of new distributed power generators such as solar panels and wind turbines, and innovative power consumers such as plug-in hybrid vehicles. One challenge in Smart Grids is to fulfill consumer demands while avoiding infrastructure overloads. Another challenge is to reduce imbalance costs: after ahead scheduling of production and consumption (the socalled ‘load schedule’), unpredictable changes in production and consumption yield a cost for repairing this balance. To cope with these risks and costs, we propose a decentralized, multi-agent system solution for coordinated charging of PHEVs in a Smart Grid. Essentially, the MAS utilizes an “intention graph” for expressing the flexibility of a fleet of PHEVs. Based on this flexibility, charging of PHEVs can be rescheduled in real-time to reduce imbalances. We discuss and evaluate two scheduling strategies for reducing imbalance costs: reactive scheduling and proactive scheduling. Simulations show that reactive scheduling is able to reduce imbalance costs by 14%, while proactive scheduling yields the highest imbalance cost reduction of 44%.