A Deep Q-Learning based Smart Scheduling of EVs for Demand Response in Smart Grids

Economic and policy factors are driving the continuous increase in the adoption and usage of electrical vehicles (EVs). However, despite being a cleaner alternative to combustion engine vehicles, EVs have negative impacts on the lifespan of microgrid equipment and energy balance due to increased power demand and the timing of their usage. In our view grid management should leverage on EVs scheduling flexibility to support local network balancing through active participation in demand response programs. In this paper, we propose a model-free solution, leveraging Deep Q-Learning to schedule the charging and discharging activities of EVs within a microgrid to align with a target energy profile provided by the distribution system operator. We adapted the Bellman Equation to assess the value of a state based on specific rewards for EV scheduling actions and used a neural network to estimate Q-values for available actions and the epsilon-greedy algorithm to balance exploitation and exploration to meet the target energy profile. The results are promising showing that the proposed solution can effectively schedule the EVs charging and discharging actions to align with the target profile with a Person coefficient of 0.99, handling effective EVs scheduling situations that involve dynamicity given by the e-mobility features, relying only on data with no knowledge of EVs and microgrid dynamics.