Stochastic Energy Pricing of an Electric Vehicle Parking Lot

The increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and the related need for efficient battery charging leads to additional challenges to the power network and energy providers. One of the main issues regards the intrinsic uncertainty affecting the EV charging process, which calls for appropriate strategies to ensure reliable solutions. From the perspective of a parking lot, the electric vehicle charging process should be managed in order to guarantee the recharge at competitive price. In this paper, the problem of energy pricing under vehicle uncertainty is addressed. Specifically, we propose a new energy pricing strategy where the daily profit of the parking lot is guaranteed with a given probability level. The source of uncertainty is related to the EV arrival/departure times and the daily number of incoming vehicles. By exploiting photovoltaic (PV) and electrical storage system (ESS) facilities, procedures and algorithms are formulated to compute the optimal selling price and to operate the battery in a receding horizon framework. Since the proposed chance constraint problems are intractable for realistic scenarios, suitable approximations are provided in order to find a feasible solution. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the tightness of the introduced relaxation, even in the presence of a high number of incoming vehicles.