Distributed charging control of electric vehicles using regret minimization

This paper presents an electric vehicle (EV) charging algorithm based on regret minimization. While many distributed algorithms for EV charging have been proposed, many of them implicitly assume low-latency two-way communication between the distribution company and the EV customers. This assumption is limiting at present. Furthermore, transmission of information about total load and planned charging schedules also raises concerns of security and privacy. The proposed algorithm resolves these issues at the expense of slower convergence to the optimal solutions. The algorithm considers a relaxation of the problem in the sense that the charging profiles are sought to be optimized over the set of profiles that do not vary from one day to the next. The proposed method only requires communication in the form of the distribution company publishing the pricing profiles implemented for the previous days. We provide convergence results for the algorithm and illustrate the results through numerical examples.