Coordinating charging request allocation between self-interested navigation service platforms

TL;DR

This paper models the allocation of EV charging stations among competing navigation platforms as a game, demonstrating that VCG mechanisms can significantly reduce social costs in both offline and online scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic model for charging station allocation among self-interested platforms and evaluates VCG mechanisms to improve social outcomes.

Findings

VCG mechanisms reduce social costs by up to 52%.

No pure Nash equilibrium guarantees exist in the proposed game.

Significant improvements observed in Berlin case studies.

Abstract

Current electric vehicle market trends indicate an increasing adoption rate across several countries. To meet the expected growing charging demand, it is necessary to scale up the current charging infrastructure and to mitigate current reliability deficiencies, e.g., due to broken connectors or misreported charging station availability status. However, even within a properly dimensioned charging infrastructure, a risk for local bottlenecks remains if several drivers cannot coordinate their charging station visit decisions. Here, navigation service platforms can optimally balance charging demand over available stations to reduce possible station visit conflicts and increase user satisfaction. While such fleet-optimized charging station visit recommendations may alleviate local bottlenecks, they can also harm the system if self-interested navigation service platforms seek to maximize their own customers' satisfaction. To study these dynamics, we model fleet-optimized charging station allocation as a resource allocation game in which navigation platforms constitute players and assign potentially free charging stations to drivers. We show that no pure Nash equilibrium guarantee exists for this game, which motivates us to study VCG mechanisms both in offline and online settings, to coordinate players' strategies toward a better social outcome. Extensive numerical studies for the city of Berlin show that when coordinating players through VCG mechanisms, the social cost decreases on average by 42 % in the online setting and by 52 % in the offline setting.