A game theoretic approach for plug-in hybrid electrical vehicle load management in the smart grid

Plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have been recently introduced as environmentally friendly and fuel economic vehicles. It is believed that they will be widely adopted in the coming years, which puts the resilience of the electric grid in question. The large amount of electricity drawn by simultaneously charging multiple PHEVs can cause electric overloads which will either destroy grid components or shorten the equipment´s life expectancy. In this paper, we propose a smart PHEVs charging algorithm to efficiently manage random and uncontrolled PHEV charging. The algorithm is based on a modified regret matching procedure that leads to a set of correlated equilibrium. A game theoretic approach is used to formulate the PHEV charging problem into a game where the players are the PHEVs and the strategies are their charging schedules. The proposed algorithm preserves users´ privacy in terms of charging schedules and does not incur much overhead on the system. Simulation results show that proposed algorithm achieves high saving in terms of the total energy costs, individual costs, and flattens the overall charging load. The algorithm is also scalable and converges in an acceptable time.