Two-sided online markets for electric vehicle charging

With the growing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs), the number of public charging stations is increasing rapidly, allowing drivers to charge their cars while parked away from home or en-route to their destination. However, as a full charge can take a significant amount of time, drivers may face queues and uncertainty over availability of charging facilities at different stations and times. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel, two-sided market for advance reservations, in which agents, representing EV owners, report their preferences for time slots and charging locations, while charging stations report their availability and costs. In our model, both parties are rational, profit-maximising entities, and buyers enter the market dynamically over time. Given this, we apply techniques from online mechanism design to develop a pricing mechanism which is truthful on the buyer side (i.e., drivers have no incentive to misreport their preferences or to delay their reservations). For the seller side, we adapt three well-known pricing mechanisms and compare them both theoretically and empirically. Using realistic simulations, we demonstrate that two of our proposed mechanisms consistently achieve a high efficiency (90–95% of optimal), while offering a trade-off between stability and budget balance. Surprisingly, the third mechanism, a common payment mechanism that is truthful in simpler settings, achieves a significantly lower efficiency and runs a high deficit

RE-ORG: An online repositioning guidance agent

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier 2Demo Paper</p

An Energy Sharing Game with Generalized Demand Bidding: Model and Properties

This paper proposes a novel energy sharing mechanism for prosumers who can produce and consume. Different from most existing works, the role of individual prosumer as a seller or buyer in our model is endogenously determined. Several desirable properties of the proposed mechanism are proved based on a generalized game-theoretic model. We show that the Nash equilibrium exists and is the unique solution of an equivalent convex optimization problem. The sharing price at the Nash equilibrium equals to the average marginal disutility of all prosumers. We also prove that every prosumer has the incentive to participate in the sharing market, and prosumers' total cost decreases with increasing absolute value of price sensitivity. Furthermore, the Nash equilibrium approaches the social optimal as the number of prosumers grows, and competition can improve social welfare.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

An EV Charging Management System Concerning Drivers' Trip Duration and Mobility Uncertainty

With continually increased attention on Electric Vehicles (EVs) due to environment impact, public Charging Stations (CSs) for EVs will become common. However, due to the limited electricity of battery, EV drivers may experience discomfort for long charging waiting time during their journeys. This often happens when a large number of (on-the-move) EVs are planning to charge at the same CS, but it has been heavily overloaded. With this concern, in an EV charging management system, we focus on CS-selection decision making and propose a scheme to manage EVs' charging plans, to minimize drivers' trip duration through intermediate charging at CSs. The proposed scheme jointly considers EVs' anticipated charging reservations (including arrival time, expected charging time) and parking duration at CSs. Furthermore, by tackling mobility uncertainty that EVs may not reach their planned CSs on time (due to traffic jams on the road), a periodical reservation updating mechanism is designed to adjust their charging plans. Results under the Helsinki city scenario with realistic EV and CS characteristics show the advantage of our proposal, in terms of minimized drivers' trip duration, as well as charging performance at the EV and CS sides

An Electric Vehicle Charging Management Scheme Based on Publish/Subscribe Communication Framework

Motivated by alleviating CO2 pollution, Electric Vehicle (EV) based applications have recently received wide interests from both commercial and research communities by using electric energy instead of traditional fuel energy. Although EVs are inherently with limited travelling distance, such limitation could be overcome by deploying public Charging Stations (CSs) to recharge EVs battery during their journeys. In this article, we propose a communication framework for on-the-move EV charging scenario, based on Publish/Subscribe (P/S) mechanism to disseminate necessary information about CSs to EVs. Concerning privacy issue, those EVs subscribing to such information could then locally make their individual decisions to select desired CSs for charging, rather than applying a centralized manner where private EV information is required to be released through communication. In this paper we propose a novel communication framework for on-the-move EV charging scenario, based on the Publish/Subscribe (P/S) mechanism for disseminating necessary CS information to EVs, in order for them to make optimized decisions on where to charge. A core part of our communication framework is the utilization of Road Side Units (RSUs) to bridge the information flow from CSs to EVs, which has been regarded as a type of cost-efficient communication infrastructure. Under this design, we introduce two complementary communication modes of signalling protocols, namely Push and Pull Modes, in order to enable the required information dissemination operation. Both analysis and simulation show the advantage of Pull Mode, in which the information is cached at RSUs to support asynchronous communication. We further propose a remote reservation service based on the Pull Mode, such that the CS-selection decision making can utilize the knowledge of EVs' charging reservation, as published from EVs through RSUs to CSs. Results show that both the performance at CS and EV sides are further improved based on using this anticipated information