Successful integration of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) into the power system is a major challenge for the future smart grid. As a result, this topic has attracted the attention of researchers from different communities in the past few years. Recent research progress has addressed different technical aspects of PHEV integration into the smart grid; such as charging and control strategies of PHEVs, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, and several application domains, such as wind energy integration, frequency regulation, design of parking areas and participation in electricity markets. Most of these works require formulation of mathematical models which extensively use artificial intelligence techniques, intelligent methods and agent-based computing approaches to solve the computational problems. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of different research problems and their solution approaches in the context of PHEV integration to smart grid.