Incentivized charging scheduling for electrical vehicles (INDUCTIVE)

Goal of the decision-making system to be developed in the INDUCTIVE project

Project Description:

The increase of Electrical Vehicles (EVs) poses a challenge for the electricity system, as it may cause high load peaks in certain hours and may thus increase the energy invoice of EV owners. 

The project INDUCTIVE (Incentivised charging scheduling for electric vehicles) tackles this challenge and aims to develop the means for electricity suppliers to gain control over power consumption patterns of EV charging. By exploiting the flexibility in each EV charging timespan, the overall load on the electricity system can be balanced and electricity will be procured at lower prices. This strategy would not only reduce the suppliers’ procurement costs and the invoices of their customers, but it would also improve their competitiveness to private-owned energy generation and storage technologies. 

To achieve this objective, INDUCTIVE will investigate the feasibility of developing three necessary enablers: (1) an estimation of the potential earnings of energy suppliers exploiting the flexibility of coordinated EV charging; (2) an incentive scheme determining proper incentives that suppliers can offer to customers in exchange of their flexibility; (3) a decision-making system that can schedule the charging timespan of the EV fleet to optimize the economic benefits while satisfying the customers’ charging requirements. 

INDUCTIVE will result in a proof of concept integrating the above three enablers together with a prototype of a mobile app interfacing EV owners with the system. For this purpose, FINATRAX will the preferences of the different stakeholders and contribute to transform these preferences into a decision-making system. 

Overall, the project will lead to an innovation of the energy retail market by automatically deciding about when and how fast to charge the car based on preset preferences and with the objective to minimize the customers’ charging and the suppliers’ procurement cost.