Real-time welfare-maximizing regulation allocation in aggregator-EVs systems

The concept of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) has gained recent interest as more and more electric vehicles (EVs) are put to use. In this paper, we consider a dynamic aggregator-EVs system, where an aggregator centrally coordinates a large number of EVs to perform regulation service. We propose a Welfare-Maximizing Regulation Allocation (WMRA) algorithm for the aggregator to fairly allocate the regulation amount among the EVs. The algorithm operates in real time and does not require any prior knowledge on the statistical information of the system. Compared with previous works, WMRA accommodates a wide spectrum of vital system characteristics, including limited EV battery size, EV self charging/discharging, EV battery degradation cost, and the cost of using external energy sources. Furthermore, our simulation results indicate that WMRA can substantially outperform a suboptimal greedy algorithm.