Asynchronous distributed charging protocol for plug-in electric vehicles

The proliferation of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) advocates a distributed paradigm for coordinating PEV charging. Unlike existing primal-dual decomposition or consensus methods, this paper proposes a cutting-plane-based distributed algorithm considering a peer-to-peer (P2P) communication network, which enables asynchronous coordination among PEVs. First, an equivalent surrogate model is established by exploiting the duality of the original optimization problem, which masks the private information of individual users by equivalent transformation. Then, a cutting-plane based algorithm is derived to solve the surrogate problem in a distributed manner with intrinsic superiority to cope with various asynchrony. Critical implementation issues, including distributed initialization, distributed cutting-plane generation, and localized stopping criteria, are discussed in detail. Numerical tests on IEEE 37- and 123-node feeders with actual data illustrate that the proposed method is resilient to several asynchronies and admits the plug-and-play operation mode. The proposed methodology is expected to provide an alternative path toward the robust protocol for PEV charging.