Bidding for Preferred Timing: An Auction Design for Electric Vehicle Charging Station Scheduling

TL;DR

This paper introduces an auction-based scheduling method for electric vehicle charging stations that accounts for user preferences and strategic behavior, ensuring efficient and privacy-preserving allocation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel iterative auction mechanism that balances social welfare maximization with privacy preservation and strategic user behavior analysis.

Findings

The auction achieves high scheduling efficiency with partial preference information.

Game theoretical analysis confirms individual rationality and strategic stability.

Experiments demonstrate effective preference elicitation and welfare optimization.

Abstract

This paper considers an electric vehicle charging scheduling setting where vehicle users can reserve charging time in advance at a charging station. In this setting, users are allowed to explicitly express their preferences over different start times and the length of charging periods for charging their vehicles. The goal is to compute optimal charging schedules which maximize the social welfare of all users given their time preferences and the state of charge of their vehicles. Assuming that users are self-interested agents who may behave strategically to advance their own benefits rather than the social welfare of all agents, we propose an iterative auction which computes high quality schedules and, at the same time, preserve users' privacy by progressively eliciting their preferences as necessary. We conduct a game theoretical analysis on the proposed iterative auction to prove its individual rationality and the best response for agents. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the iterative auction can achieve high-efficiency solutions with a partial value information. Additionally, we explore the relationship between scheduling efficiency and information revelation in the auction.