Managing residential-level EV charging using network-as-automation platform (NAP) technology

Abstract

The amount of power that can be provided for charging the batteries of the electric vehicles connected to a single neighborhood step-down transformer is constrained by the infrastructure. This paper presents a distributed and collaborative residential-level power grid management application to alleviate the need of costly infrastructure upgrade. The application is designed to be hosted in our in-house developed network-as-automation platform (NAP) technology where most of the control functionalities may be moved onto the networking devices. Moreover, we have adapted a service-oriented software engineering principle to achieve scalability, autonomous, and architecture agnostic properties for the residential-level EV charging. We demonstrate a functional prototype where off-the-shelf networking devices capable to host a Linux Operating system are used to showcase the NAP technology. Furthermore, we developed a webbased user interface that may be accessible from any standard computing device, e.g. iPhone, to monitor the runtime operation of this application.

Home energy management as a service over networking platforms

“…The energy management may have different purposes like: 1) monitoring and metering the energy consumption of each device in the house to estimate the monthly bill; and 2) implement algorithms for managing the smart devices efficiently, e.g. intelligent lighting, EV charger [16], HVAC management, smart refrigerator, etc.…”

A model-based design of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

“…Unfortunately, this solution would undermine the economic and environmental benefits of EVs. Another solution, which would not have such a drastic downside, could be to control and coordinate the EV charging locally or at the substation level to mitigate the impact of EV charging from generating a peak [30]. In order to implement this solution and to balance the supply and demand, we need new control algorithms which may be tested, verified, and validated through MILS.…”