Ant-Based Swarm Algorithm for Charging Coordination of Electric Vehicles

Uncontrolled charging of large-scale electric vehicles (EVs) can affect the safe and economic operation of power systems, especially at the distribution level. The centralized EVs charging optimization methods require complete information of physical appliances and using habits, which will cause problems of high dimensionality and communication block. Given this, an ant-based swarm algorithm (ASA) is proposed to realize the EVs charging coordination at the transformer level, which can overcome the drawbacks of centralized control method. First, the EV charging load model is developed, and the charging management structure based on swarm intelligence is presented. Second, basic data of the EV using habit is sampled by the Monte Carlo method, and the ASA is applied to realize the load valley filling. The load fluctuation and the transformer capacity are also considered in the algorithm. Finally, the charging coordination of 500 EVs under a 12.47 KV transformer is simulated to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.