Complexity of Scheduling Charging in the Smart Grid

Complexity of Scheduling Charging in the Smart Grid

Mathijs de Weerdt, Michael Albert, Vincent Conitzer, Koos van der Linden

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4736-4742. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/658

The problem of optimally scheduling the charging demand of electric vehicles within the constraints of the electricity infrastructure is called the charge scheduling problem. The models of the charging speed, horizon, and charging demand determine the computational complexity of the charge scheduling problem. We show that for about 20 variants the problem is either in P or weakly NP-hard and dynamic programs exist to compute optimal solutions. About 10 other variants of the problem are strongly NP-hard, presenting a potentially significant obstacle to their use in practical situations of scale. An experimental study establishes up to what parameter values the dynamic programs can determine optimal solutions in a couple of minutes.
Keywords:
Constraints and SAT: Dynamic Programming
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning
Planning and Scheduling: Scheduling
Planning and Scheduling: Theoretical Foundations of Planning