A Pricing Mechanism for Balancing the Charging of Ride-Hailing Electric Vehicle Fleets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game theoretic pricing model for managing electric vehicle charging in ride-hailing fleets, aiming to optimize costs and prevent station overcrowding through incentivized equilibrium strategies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel pricing mechanism that aligns fleet operators' incentives with central authority targets in a competitive ride-hailing environment.

Findings

Pricing policies can achieve desired load balancing at equilibrium.

Decentralized algorithm effectively computes Nash equilibria.

Numerical example demonstrates practical applicability.

Abstract

Both ride-hailing services and electric vehicles are becoming increasingly popular and it is likely that charging management of the ride-hailing vehicles will be a significant part of the ride-hailing company's operation in the near future. Motivated by this, we propose a game theoretic model for charging management, where we assume that it is the fleet-operator that wants to minimize its operational cost, which among others include the price of charging. To avoid overcrowded charging stations, a central authority will design pricing policies to incentivize the vehicles to spread out among the charging stations, in a setting where several ride-hailing companies compete about the resources. We show that it is possible to construct pricing policies that make the Nash-equilibrium between the companies follow the central authority's target value when the desired load is feasible. Moreover, we provide a decentralized algorithm for computation of the equilibrium and conclude the paper with a numerical example illustrating the results.