Scheduling bidirectional battery charging with minimum (dis)charging thresholds

Devices capable of bidirectional charging, such as electric vehicles and home batteries, play a crucial role in decentralized energy management (DEM) to help balance loads locally. Most methods for scheduling such assets assume that they can charge and discharge at any rate between given maximum rates. However, in practice (dis)charging at low rates close to zero is undesirable or even impossible due to technical limitations. Therefore, this paper presents a heuristic algorithm for scheduling bidirectional charging of batteries that takes into account minimum (dis)charging thresholds. We show that the resulting schedules generally have only a few time intervals where (dis)charging happens below the thresholds, which greatly improves upon common approaches for battery scheduling that ignore the thresholds. In particular, our approach computes optimal schedules satisfying the minimum threshold constraints for more than 70% of the considered problem instances.