Distributionally Robust Aggregation of Electric Vehicle Flexibility

We address the problem of characterising the aggregate flexibility in populations of electric vehicles (EVs) with uncertain charging requirements. Building on previous results that provide exact characterisations of the aggregate flexibility in populations with known charging requirements, in this paper we extend the aggregation methods so that charging requirements are assumed to be uncertain, but sampled from a known distribution. In doing so we, construct distributionally robust aggregate flexibility sets, sets of aggregate charging profiles, over which we can provide probabilistic guarantees, that sampled populations will be able to track. By leveraging certain measure concentration results that establish powerful finite sample guarantees, we are able to give tight bounds on these robust flexibility sets, even in low sample regimes that are well suited for aggregating small populations of EVs. We detail explicit methods of calculating these sets and provide numerical results that validate the theory developed here.