A distributed approach for electric vehicle smart charging scheduling using blockchain

This paper proposes a novel energy management architecture to implement centralized and distributed ap proaches for scheduling the electric vehicles (EVs) charging operations within smart districts. The scheduling of the recharge operations of the EVs fleet in the district is centrally optimized by the District Energy Management System which solves an ILP problem to optimize the charging schedule minimizing the total district cost, avoiding demand peaks, and taking into account the EV user preferences and privacy. To address the complexity of large dimension problems a distributed approach is proposed where Charge Point Operators (CPOs) cooperate and recursively determine a suboptimal solution in reasonable time. Thanks to the innovative use of the Blockchain, the proposed distributed algorithm is performed in a parallel fashion by a set of external Blockchain solvers in a dedicated cluster and the CPOs do not exchange information with external entities. The distributed algorithm convergence is proved and a simulation analysis with a case study validates the performance of the proposed approaches.