Optimal Scheduling of Electric Vehicle Charging with Deep Reinforcement
  Learning considering End Users Flexibility
Christoforos Menos-Aikateriniadis Stavros Sykiotis Pavlos S. Georgilakis
The rapid growth of decentralized energy resources and especially Electric
Vehicles (EV), that are expected to increase sharply over the next decade, will
put further stress on existing power distribution networks, increasing the need
for higher system reliability and flexibility. In an attempt to avoid
unnecessary network investments and to increase the controllability over
distribution networks, network operators develop demand response (DR) programs
that incentivize end users to shift their consumption in return for financial
or other benefits. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are in the research
forefront for residential load scheduling applications, mainly due to their
high accuracy, high computational speed and lower dependence on the physical
characteristics of the models under development. The aim of this work is to
identify households' EV cost-reducing charging policy under a Time-of-Use
tariff scheme, with the use of Deep Reinforcement Learning, and more
specifically Deep Q-Networks (DQN). A novel end users flexibility potential
reward is inferred from historical data analysis, where households with solar
power generation have been used to train and test the designed algorithm. The
suggested DQN EV charging policy can lead to more than 20% of savings in end
users electricity bills.