Stochastic park-and-charge balancing for fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles

Motivated by the need to provide services to alleviate range anxiety of electric vehicles, we consider the problem of balancing charging demand across a network of charging stations. Our objective is to reduce the potential for excessively long queues to build up at some charging stations, although other charging stations are underutilized. A stochastic balancing algorithm is presented to achieve these goals. A further feature of this algorithm is that it is fully decentralized and facilitates a plug-and-play type of behavior. Using our system, the charging stations can join and leave the network without any changes to, or communication with, a centralized infrastructure. Analysis and simulations are presented to illustrate the efficacy of our algorithm. © 2000-2011 IEEE.