Integrating Aggregated Electric Vehicle Flexibilities in Unit Commitment Models using Submodular Optimization

Hélène Arvis; Olivier Beaude; Nicolas Gast; Stéphane Gaubert; Bruno Gaujal

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arXiv · 2511.11191

Integrating Aggregated Electric Vehicle Flexibilities in Unit Commitment Models using Submodular Optimization

Hélène Arvis·Olivier Beaude·Nicolas Gast·Stéphane Gaubert·Bruno Gaujal

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Abstract

The Unit Commitment (UC) problem consists in controlling a large fleet of heterogeneous electricity production units in order to minimize the total production cost while satisfying consumer demand. Electric Vehicles (EVs) are used as a source of flexibility and are often aggregated for problem tractability. We develop a new approach to integrate EV flexibilities in the UC problem and exploit the generalized polymatroid structure of aggregated flexibilities of a large population of users to develop an exact optimization algorithm, combining a cutting-plane approach and submodular optimization. We show in particular that the UC can be solved exactly in a time which scales linearly, up to a logarithmic factor, in the number of EV users when each production unit is subject to convex constraints. We illustrate our approach by solving a real instance of a long-term UC problem, combining open-source data of the European grid (European Resource Adequacy Assessment project) and data originating from a survey of user behavior of the French EV fleet.

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Hélène Arvis, Olivier Beaude, Nicolas Gast, Stéphane Gaubert, Bruno Gaujal. 2025-11-14. Integrating Aggregated Electric Vehicle Flexibilities in Unit Commitment Models using Submodular Optimization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11191

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