Urgency-driven, plug-in electric vehicle charging

In this work, we propose a strategy for managing the charging of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) that simultaneously avoids overloads and provides demand-based allocation of power distribution resources. The strategy leverages (1) a `power packet´ approach which allocates charging for finite lengths of time and (2) a locally defined automaton where a user´s `urgency´ sets the request rate for charging. The charge management strategy requires very little communications between the PEV charger and the power distribution system. Furthermore, the system´s charge manager is blind to which PEV is making the request thereby ensuring fairness and privacy. The work details possible implementations of the approach and illustrates the methodology through simulations.