Smart Electric Vehicle Charging via Adjustable Real-Time Charging Rates

This paper presents a plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) charging control algorithm, Adjustable Real-Time Valley Filling (ARVF), to improve PEV charging and minimize adverse effects from uncontrolled PEV charging on the grid. ARVF operates in real time, adjusts to sudden deviations between forecasted and actual baseloads, and uses fuzzy logic to deliver variable charging rates between 1.9 and 7.2 kW. Fuzzy logic is selected for this application because it can optimize nonlinear systems, operate in real time, scale efficiently, and be computationally fast, making ARVF a robust algorithm for real-world applications. In addition, this study proves that when the forecasted and actual baseload vary by more than 20%, its real-time capability is more advantageous than algorithms that use optimization techniques on predicted baseload data.