Gradually replacing fossil-fueled vehicles in the transport sector with Electric Vehicles (EVs) may help ensure a sustainable future. With regard to the charging electric load of EVs, optimal scheduling of EV batteries, controlled by an aggregating agent, may provide flexibility and increase system efficiency. This work proposes a stochastic bilevel optimization problem based on the Stackelberg game to create price incentives that generate optimal trading plans for an EV aggregator in day-ahead, intra-day and real-time markets. The upper level represents the profit maximizer EV aggregator who participates in three sequential markets and is called a Stackelberg leader, while the second level represents the EV owner who aims at minimizing the EV charging cost, and who is called a Stackelberg follower. This formulation determines endogenously the profit-maximizing price levels constraint by cost-minimizing EV charging plans. To solve the proposed stochastic bilevel program, the second level is replaced by its optimality conditions. The strong duality theorem is deployed to substitute the complementary slackness condition. The final model is a stochastic convex problem which can be solved efficiently to determine the global optimality. Illustrative results are reported based on a small case with two vehicles. The numerical results rely on applying the proposed methodology to a large scale fleet of 100, 500, 1000 vehicles, which provides insights into the computational tractability of the current formulation.
Stochastic Bilevel Program for Optimal Coordinated Energy Trading of an EV Aggregator