Admission Control and Scheduling for EV Charging Station Considering Time-of-Use Pricing

This paper studies the scheduling of multiple Electric Vehicles' (EVs) charging with service quality constraint at a workplace charging station, aiming to maximize the profit of the charging station under time- of-use (TOU) pricing. We develop a multi-charger framework considering both the customers' and charging station's interests. First, an admission control mechanism is proposed to guarantee that all admitted EVs' charging requirements can be satisfied before their departure time. Then, under the premise of declining the customers' requirements as little as possible, a Joint Searching (JS) scheduling algorithm is proposed to maximize the profit of the charging station. Extensive simulations based on realistic EV charging information and TOU pricing have been conducted. Simulation results exhibit that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art solution in terms of up to 30% profit and similar service declining probability.

I. Introduction

Given the growing popularity of EV and plug-in hybrid EV, it is anticipated that future garages (such as the parking lots for office buildings or business districts) can also provide EV charging services and function as charging stations [1], [2]. However, without a proper coordinated charging technique, either the EV charging requests may miss the deadline or the charging station has to unnecessarily decline the service requests. These negative effects may severely affect the customer satisfaction and result in revenue loss for the charging station [3], [4]. To mitigate these negative effects, it is crucial to design efficient admission control and scheduling algorithms for EV charging stations. Furthermore, the utility company may regulate the total load using real-time pricing (RTP) or time-of-use (TOU) pricing. As TOU pricing has been widely adopted [5], we also need to consider its impact on the profit for the charging stations.