An Intelligent Energy Management Mechanism for Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles (EVs) have become increasingly popular all over the world in recent years. Many countries have been offering reward policies and facilitating the establishment of EV charging stations and battery exchange stations to encourage use of these vehicles by the public. However, in terms of electricity demand, the rapid establishment of EV charging stations and battery exchange stations may lead to significant increases in peak loads, the contracted capacities, and basic electricity charges. In this work, an intelligent EV energy management mechanism is proposed to make use of scheduling systems for the charging stations in order to determine when to store electricity in batteries according to the real-time electricity price and the recharging requirements of EVs. Meanwhile, a recharging suggestion module is presented in this work for locating the most suitable charging station or battery exchange station for an EV according to the available information on hand. When an EV cannot reach any charging station because it is running out of electric power, a mobile CV management module is used to assist the EV to find a suitable mobile CV for recharging. Notably, a well-known machine learning technique, multiobjective particle swarm optimization, was employed in this work to assist in solving the multiobjective optimization problems during the design of an energy management mechanism. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can balance the loading of battery charging and exchange stations, and lower the load peak to keep electricity cost down. Meanwhile, the recharging suggestion module can decrease the driving distance of EVs for finding the charging stations, as well as decreasing the waiting time wasted while charging. The mobile CV management module, for its part, can effectively prevent EVs from becoming stranded on the road because they have run out of electricity.