An intelligent electric vehicle charging system for new energy companies based on consortium blockchain

With the concerns of environment protection, electric vehicle (EV) is regarded as a promising transportation tool for green cities project. Since the amount of EV is rising shapely, the EV charging demands is also rapidly generated. However, seeking suitable charging facilities is not easy for EV users, new energy companies run charging station separately for self-interests, and charging pile information is not transparent for drivers. This dilemma is not solved until the merging of blockchain technology. In this paper, a novel EV charging system is proposed for the cooperation of new energy companies and providing convenient charging services for users. In this system, charging information is managed and recorded by the company alliance based on consortium blockchain, which is tamper-resistant and multi-centralized. Meanwhile, a new smart contract is designed to balance the allocation of company' charging users, so that the profits of different new energy companies could be fairer. To equilibrate the interest of companies and EV users, a Bio-Objective Mixed-Integer Programming model (BOMILP) is proposed as the mathematical logic of smart contracts. Furthermore, we proposed a new algorithm named Limited Neighborhood Search with Memory (LNSM) to support the implementation of smart contracts, which could make the smart contract running faster and has a better performance. At last, the proposed EV charging system and the smart contract are validated through a real case study with the EV charging data in Beijing, China. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.