An Updated Review and Outlook on Electric Vehicle Aggregators in Electric Energy Networks

Electric vehicles (EVs) are predicted to be highly integrated into future smart grids considering their significant role in achieving a safe environment and sustainable transportation. The charging/discharging flexibility of EVs, which can be aggregated by an agent, provides the opportunity of participating in the demand-side management of energy networks. The individual participation of consumers at the system level would not be possible for two main reasons: (i) In general, their individual capacity is below the required minimum to participate in power system markets, and (ii) the number of market participants would be large, and thus the volume of individual transactions would be difficult to manage. In order to facilitate the interactions between consumers and the power grid, an aggregation agent would be required. The EV aggregation area and their integration challenges and impacts on electricity markets and distribution networks is investigated in much research studies from different planning and operation points of view. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review and outlook on EV aggregation models in electrical energy systems. The authors aim to study the main objectives and contributions of recent papers and investigate the proposed models in such areas in detail. In addition, this paper discusses the primary considerations and challenging issues of EV aggregators reported by various research studies. In addition, the proposed research outlines the future trends around electric vehicle aggregators and their role in electrical energy systems.