| Abstract |
The advent of Electric Vehicles (EV) may introduce disturbances to the operation of the Power Grid, due to the great demands of electric power that is required during the simultaneous charging of large EV fleets. Towards this end, novel approaches for the management of the EV charging have been proposed in recent literature. Nevertheless, the implementation of a framework that allows flexibility in the definition of the decision-making objectives, along with user-defined criteria is still a challenge. Towards addressing this challenge, a framework for the smart charging of EVs is presented in this paper. The smart charging is facilitated by a two-layer Genetic Algorithm that operates in Charging Stations with various types of chargers that are connected to multiple charging points in a resource-sharing manner. The benefits of the proposed approach are the fast optimisation time, the inclusion of user-defined criteria, and the extraction of feasible solutions considering the availability of the chargers in the station. The communications between the EV and the Charging Station are facilitated by the Open Platform Communications-Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) standard. The proposed algorithm succeeds into finding competitive solutions even during charging scenarios with conflicting criteria. |
