Price of anarchy in electric vehicle charging control games: When Nash equilibria achieve social welfare

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the price of anarchy in electric vehicle charging games, showing Nash equilibria align with social welfare and quantifying their asymptotic behavior as the number of vehicles grows large.

Contribution

It proves the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibria in heterogeneous EV charging games and characterizes their asymptotic social welfare properties.

Findings

Unique Nash equilibrium exists for any finite number of agents.

As the number of agents increases, the game’s outcome approaches the social optimum.

The price of anarchy converges to 1 in large populations under certain conditions.

Abstract

We consider the problem of optimal charging of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). We treat this problem as a multi-agent game, where vehicles/agents are heterogeneous since they are subject to possibly different constraints. Under the assumption that electricity price is affine in total demand, we show that, for any finite number of heterogeneous agents, the PEV charging control game admits a unique Nash equilibrium, which is the optimizer of an auxiliary minimization program. We are also able to quantify the asymptotic behaviour of the price of anarchy for this class of games. More precisely, we prove that if the parameters defining the constraints of each vehicle are drawn randomly from a given distribution, then, the value of the game converges almost surely to the optimum of the cooperative problem counterpart as the number of agents tends to infinity. In the case of a discrete probability distribution, we provide a systematic way to abstract agents in homogeneous groups and show that, as the number of agents tends to infinity, the value of the game tends to a deterministic quantity.