An adaptive scheduling of PHEV charging: Analysis under imperfect data communication

Because of rising environmental concern and depleting of oil resources, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) is considered to be a potential substitution of a fossil fuel-based vehicle. With the development of smart grid, real-time pricing (RTP) is being implemented. The charging of PHEVs can be scheduled adaptively to RTP so that the power consumption cost can be minimized. In this paper, a battery replacement strategy is adopted for a charging process in a charging station. We develop the scheduling scheme for PHEV charging. An optimization problem is formulated and solved for an optimal charging policy that minimizes the cost due to power consumption and performance degradation. In addition, the impact of incomplete power price information (e.g., due to unavailability of data communication channel) is analyzed. The numerical results show that if multiple data communication channels are available for transferring the power price information, the scheduling performance can be improved significantly.