Architecture and Communication of an Electric Vehicle Virtual Power Plant

This paper outlines an architectue of an electric vehicle (EV) based vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integrating virtual power plant (VPP). The overall system architecture, a sketch of the trip-prediction algorithm, and the associated optimization problem are provided. The communication requirements for our proposed architecture are derived, with emphasis on its reliability, responsiveness, security, and application-level behaviour. We propose extensive use of well-known, standardized, communication protocols between EVs and the centralized VPP to transmit status and trip information from EVs to the VPP as well as to control the charging process.