Comparison between Inflexible and Flexible Charging of Electric Vehicles—A Study from the Perspective of an Aggregator

This paper is about the problem of the management of an aggregator of electric vehicles participating in an electricity market environment. The problem consists in the maximization of the expected profit through a formulation given by a stochastic programming problem to consider the uncertainty faced by the aggregator. This uncertainty is due to the day-ahead market prices and the driving requirements of the owners of the vehicles. Depending on the consent of the owners, inflexible charging to flexible charging is considered. Thus, the aggregator can propose different profiles and charging periods to the owners of electric vehicles. Qualitatively, as expected, the more flexible the vehicle owners, the higher the expected profit. The formulation, however, offers more to the aggregator and provides the ability to quantify the influence of consent of favorable driving requirements in the expected profit, allowing the aggregator to consider rewarding the owners of vehicles with more flexibility. Case studies addressed are for comparison of the influence of owners having inflexibility, partial flexibility, or flexibility in the expected profit of the aggregator.