Incentive-Based Electric Vehicle Charging for Managing Bottleneck Congestion

TL;DR

This paper introduces an incentive-based policy for electric vehicle charging that reduces road congestion by offering discounts to flexible EV owners, demonstrating potential for complete congestion elimination with sufficient budget.

Contribution

It presents a novel demand management policy using monetary incentives for EV charging to effectively manage bottleneck congestion, including optimal discount computation.

Findings

Complete congestion elimination possible with sufficient budget

Optimal discount levels derived analytically

Numerical simulations validate theoretical results

Abstract

We propose an incentive-based traffic demand management policy to alleviate traffic congestion on a road stretch that creates a bottleneck for the commuters. The incentive targets electric vehicles owners by proposing a discount on the energy price they use to charge their vehicles if they are flexible in their departure time. We show that, with a sufficient monetary budget, it is possible to completely eliminate the traffic congestion and we compute the optimal discount. We analyse also the case of limited budget, when the congestion cannot be completely eliminated. We compute analytically the policy minimising the congestion and estimate the level of inefficiency for different budgets. We corroborate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations that allow us to highlight the power of the proposed method in providing practical advice for the design of policies.