Forecast-Enhanced Lyapunov Optimization for Real-Time EV Charging Scheduling
Electric vehicles (EVs) play a vital role in achieving carbon neutrality. Various approaches have been developed for online optimal EV charging scheduling to maximize their environmental and economic benefits. Among them, Lyapunov optimization has gained wide adoption due to its ease of implementation, no need for predictions, and rigorous performance guarantees. However, this prediction-free nature also limits the performance of Lyapunov optimization, as it cannot fully leverage the relatively accurate short-term forecasts often available in practice. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a forecast-enhanced Lyapunov optimization method for real-time EV charging scheduling. Specifically, we design novel virtual queues and embed the traditional Lyapunov optimization within a receding horizon control framework to incorporate short-term predictions. The proposed algorithm is further extended by introducing heterogeneous penalty parameters to reduce the optimality gap. We prove that the proposed algorithm achieves bounded charging delay and a bounded optimality gap between online and offline solutions, both depending on the prediction window length. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method reduces operational costs compared to the traditional prediction-free Lyapunov optimization algorithm, while still satisfying all charging requirements.