Abstract:

Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) play a pivotal role in transportation electrification. The flexible nature of PEVs’ charging demand can be utilized for reducing charging cost as well as optimizing the operating cost of power and transportation networks. The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide a thorough vision towards leveraging the interdependence of power and transportation networks while taking advantage of PEVs as coupling agents. The authors develop a holistic framework that enables distributed coordination of interdependent networks through the IoT lens. To this end, the authors propose to use a fully distributed consensus+innovations approach.  The approach constitutes solving an iterative problem, which utilizes communication at the smart city layer, as a network of infrastructures, including power grid and electrified transportation network, that enables fully distributed coordination of agents. The authors investigate a detailed application of  framework for interdependent power systems and electrified transportation networks. To this end, they first identify the functionalities, constraints, objectives, and decision variables of each network. Then, the authors investigate the interdependent interactions among these networks and their corresponding agents.