Smart charging management system for electric vehicles in coupled transportation and power distribution systems

Highlights: • Coupled transportation and power system operation for EVs are considered. • Elastic charging behavior of EVs are considered in the above coupled operation. • A distributed coordination pricing method is designed. -- Abstract: With the increasing popularity of electric vehicles, the connections between urban transportation and power distribution systems gradually change from independent to tightly coupled. To promote the coordinated operation of the two kind of systems, this paper proposes a smart charging management system considering the elastic response of electric vehicle users to electricity charging price. In this system, a multi-class user traffic equilibrium assignment model with elastic charging demand is formulated to capture link flow distributions of vehicles across the urban transportation network and estimate charging demand of each fast charging station. An alternating current optimal power flow model for power distribution network is also established to calculate optimal charging capacity of each fast charging station and scheduling plan of generators. Combining the above two models, a distributed coordination pricing method is designed based on alternating direction multiplier method, which can obtain a proper electricity charging price signal to better manage electric vehicles. A case study is performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed model and the distributed coordination pricing method.