A Novel Charging Scheme for Electric Vehicles With Smart Communities in Vehicular Networks

In a smart community (SC) with renewable energy sources (RES), flexible charging service can be provisioned to electric vehicles (EVs), where EVs can choose clean energy, traditional energy, or the mixture of them on demand in the vehicular networks. Considering the existence of various entities in the SC and the limited generation capacity of RES, it becomes of significance yet very challenging to optimally schedule the charging service for EVs with different consumption preferences. In this paper, we propose a charging scheme for EVs in a SC integrated with RES using a game theoretical approach. First, a three-party energy network is proposed to model the interactions among the main grid, EVs, and aggregators in the smart grid. Second, the trust model is presented to improve the safety of energy trading by evaluating the reliability of aggregators based on direct trust and indirect trust. Third, based on the four-stage Stackelberg game, the optimal strategies of three energy entities are analyzed. The Stackelberg equilibrium can be obtained by the proposed accelerated gradient descent based iteration algorithm. Furthermore, a weighted max–min fairness based energy allocation algorithm is proposed to allocate the limited renewable energy for EVs in a fair and efficient manner. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through comparison with conventional schemes.