February 16, 2016: Invited Speaker Seminar: Smart Rate Control and Demand Balancing for Electric Vehicle Charging

Fanxin Kong, Ph.D

Tuesday, February 16, 2016 at 10:15 a.m.
Room EV003.309

Abstract

Charging stations have become indispensable infrastructure to support the rapid proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs). The operational scheme of charging stations is crucial to satisfy the stability of the power grid and the quality of service (QoS) to EV users. Existing works either overlook the importance of charging stations or solely focus on the grid impact associated with EV charging. This would cause two possible consequences: 1) power infrastructure overloading which jeopardizes its stability and safety; or 2) QoS degradation which compromises EV development. By contrast, my work studies charging station operation, and designs a hierarchical operational scheme that optimizes both user QoS and the grid stability. The lower level deals with charging rate control, for which I propose an efficient algorithm with provable QoS-optimal allocation of power supply to EVs. The upper level handles charging demand balancing, for which I design two approximation algorithms that schedule EVs to multiple charging stations. Through extensive simulations based on realistic data traces and simulations tools, we demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of our operational scheme and further provide interesting findings from in-depth analysis of the experimental results.

Biography

Fanxin Kong is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He received his B.Sc.Eng degree in Computer Science and Technology and M.Sc.Eng degree in Computer Application Technology from Northeastern University, China. His research interests include computer networks, data science and power systems, and specially span the areas of cyber-physical and real-time systems, cloud computing and big data, and smart grid and energy systems. He has published over 20 research papers in major peer-reviewed international journals and conference proceedings in these areas.