A Review on Charging Strategies of Plug-in Electric Vehicles

The Charging and Discharging strategies and optimal scheduling of Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) are very active area of research in which several hundred papers are published each year. The main goal of this area of study is to optimize the charging and discharging of PEVs in a way to reduce the power losses on the power grid, and reduce total operation cost. These studies have developed several techniques for optimizations, and they have proved that the coordinated charging and discharging have many benefits to the power grid, aggregators and PEV owners. While the uncoordinated charging may cause severe problems to the grid such as increasing the peak demand, increasing the power losses and operation costs, increasing voltage deviation, reducing grid stability, and it may overheat transformers and could destroy them or reduce their lifetime. This paper gives a general review on the domain of charging and discharging strategies of PEVs, their advantages and barriers; optimal scheduling; different types of charging rates; different pricing mechanisms; different management techniques; different optimization techniques, their main objective functions and constraints; and many others.