Electric Vehicle Charging Scheduling Using Ant Colony System

Abstract

In this work we consider the scheduling problem for charging a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) within a station such that the total tardiness of the problem is minimized. The generation of a feasible and efficient schedule is a difficult task due to the physical and power constraints of the charging station, i.e., the maximum contracted power and the maximum power imbalance between the lines of the electric feeder. The ant colony optimization (ACO) metaheuristic is applied to coordinate the charging process of the EVs within the charging station by generating efficient schedules. The behaviour and performance of ACO is analyzed and compared against state-of-the-art approaches on a benchmark set inspired by real-world scenarios. The experimental results show that the application of ACO is highly effective and outperforms other approaches.