An Efficient Method for Quantifying the Aggregate Flexibility of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Populations

Plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) are widely recognized as being highly flexible electric loads that can be pooled and controlled via aggregators to provide low-cost energy and ancillary services to wholesale electricity markets. To participate in these markets, an aggregator must encode the aggregate flexibility of the population of EVs under their command as a single polytope that is compliant with existing market rules. To this end, we investigate the problem of characterizing the aggregate flexibility set of a heterogeneous population of EVs whose individual flexibility sets are given as convex polytopes in half-space representation. As the exact computation of the aggregate flexibility set – the Minkowski sum of the individual flexibility sets – is known to be intractable, we study the problem of computing maximum-volume inner approximations to the aggregate flexibility set by optimizing over affine transformations of a given convex polytope in half-space representation. We show how to conservatively approximate these set containment problems as linear programs that scale polynomially with the number and dimension of the individual flexibility sets. The inner approximation methods provided in this paper generalize and improve upon existing methods from the literature. We illustrate the improvement in approximation accuracy and performance achievable by our methods with numerical experiments.