EVaaS: a novel on-demand outage mitigation framework for electric vehicle enabled microgrids

Electric vehicles as a service (EVaaS) describes a system in which electric vehicles (EVs) communicate with the microgrid to participate in demand response services. Electric vehicles (EVs) are important distributed energy resources for generating revenue, reducing emissions, mitigating the severity of an outage and restoring the distribution system rapidly to achieve resilient microgrids. However, they are currently under-utilized. For better utilization, this paper proposes EVaaS in microgrids to restore critical load (CL). First, EVaaS framework and challenges associated with deployment, as well as high speed and low latency EVaaS communications are introduced and discussed. Then, the association problem of EVs and CL is formulated and a heuristic method is then proposed, which aims to minimize the operating cost and number of associated EVs by solving a mixed linear integer problem. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate and verify the proposed model. Illustrative cases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed deployment strategy and algorithm.