FPGA implementation of an evolutionary algorithm based charge management for electric vehicles

Electric vehicles today are getting more usable. Due to the progress in accumulator technology and power electronics, modern electric vehicles offer performances allowing using them in daily life. It is forecasted that the number of battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHET) will increase to 5 million vehicles by the year 2020. The increase of electric vehicles will have an impact on the existing power infrastructure, especially at specific times of day. In this paper a decentralized approach to calculate a charging schedule for electric vehicles is presented. Each electric vehicle in a so called consumer grid is equipped with a power controlling unit (PCU). The PCUs are connected to each other and communicate their individual demands for power. By using an evolutionary algorithm, a schedule is calculated that ensures that all electric vehicles are charged and that a given maximum peak power is not exceeded. The proposed approach was implemented in a Java program and its performance was evaluated for different scenarios. Afterwards, a VHDL implementation was created and verified using simulation and FPGAs.