A Multi-Agent System for Controlled Charging of a Large Population of Electric Vehicles

The share of electric vehicles (EVs) is expected to increase significantly in the vehicle market sales in the forthcoming years. Uncontrolled charging of EVs can affect adversely the normal operation of the power system, especially at the distribution level. This paper proposes a distributed, multi-agent EV charging control method based on the Nash Certainty Equivalence Principle that considers network impacts. Convergence of the method when the EVs control agents are uncoupled and weakly-coupled is discussed. The efficiency of the proposed management system is evaluated through simulation of a realistic, urban distribution network.