LAPSE:2023.14910
Published Article

LAPSE:2023.14910
Mechanism Design for Efficient Offline and Online Allocation of Electric Vehicles to Charging Stations
March 2, 2023
The industry related to electric vehicles (EVs) has seen a substantial increase in recent years, as such vehicles have the ability to significantly reduce total CO2 emissions and the related global warming effect. In this paper, we focus on the problem of allocating EVs to charging stations, scheduling and pricing their charging. Specifically, we developed a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) which executes offline and optimally allocates EVs to charging stations. On top, we propose two alternative mechanisms to price the electricity the EVs charge. The first mechanism is a typical fixed-price one, while the second is a variation of the Vickrey−Clark−Groves (VCG) mechanism. We also developed online solutions that incrementally call the MIP-based algorithm and solve it for branches of EVs. In all cases, the EVs’ aim is to minimize the price to pay and the impact on their driving schedule, acting as self-interested agents. We conducted a thorough empirical evaluation of our mechanisms and we observed that they had satisfactory scalability. Additionally, the VCG mechanism achieved an up to 2.2% improvement in terms of the number of vehicles that were charged compared to the fixed-price one and, in cases where the stations were congested, it calculated higher prices for the EVs and provided a higher profit for the stations, but lower utility to the EVs. However, in a theoretical evaluation, we proved that the variant of the VCG mechanism being proposed in this paper still guaranteed truthful reporting of the EVs’ preferences. In contrast, the fixed-price one was found to be vulnerable to agents’ strategic behavior as non-truthful EVs can charge instead of truthful ones. Finally, we observed the online algorithms to be, on average, at 95.6% of the offline ones in terms of the average number of serviced EVs.
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Keywords
charging, electric vehicles, fixed price, mechanism design, Scheduling, VCG
Subject
Suggested Citation
Rigas ES, Gerding EH, Stein S, Ramchurn SD, Bassiliades N. Mechanism Design for Efficient Offline and Online Allocation of Electric Vehicles to Charging Stations. (2023). LAPSE:2023.14910
Author Affiliations
Rigas ES: School of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece [ORCID]
Gerding EH: Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Stein S: Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Ramchurn SD: Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Bassiliades N: School of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece [ORCID]
Gerding EH: Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Stein S: Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Ramchurn SD: Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Bassiliades N: School of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece [ORCID]
Journal Name
Energies
Volume
15
Issue
5
First Page
1660
Year
2022
Publication Date
2022-02-23
ISSN
1996-1073
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Original Submission
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PII: en15051660, Publication Type: Journal Article
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LAPSE:2023.14910
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https://doi.org/10.3390/en15051660
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Mar 2, 2023
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