A Game-Theoretic Framework for Intelligent EV Charging Network Optimisation in Smart Cities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic framework for optimizing electric vehicle charging infrastructure in smart cities, balancing user convenience, economic viability, and traffic efficiency through strategic placement and pricing of charging stations.

Contribution

It presents a novel joint placement and pricing optimization model that explicitly captures driver behavior and proposes a scalable solution method with demonstrated improvements over existing approaches.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods by at least 16% in efficiency.

Effectively adapts to different budgets, EV penetration, and station capacities.

Scalable to larger networks with a generalization procedure.

Abstract

The transition to Electric Vehicles (EVs) demands intelligent, congestion-aware infrastructure planning to balance user convenience, economic viability, and traffic efficiency. We present a joint optimisation framework for EV Charging Station (CS) placement and pricing, explicitly capturing strategic driver behaviour through coupled non-atomic congestion games over road networks and charging facilities. From a Public Authority (PA) perspective, the model minimises social cost, travel times, queuing delays and charging expenses, while ensuring infrastructure profitability. To solve the resulting Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programme, we propose a scalable two-level approximation method, Joint Placement and Pricing Optimisation under Driver Equilibrium (JPPO-DE), combining driver behaviour decomposition with integer relaxation. Experiments on the benchmark Sioux Falls Transportation Network (TN) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms single-parameter baselines, effectively adapting to varying budgets, EV penetration levels, and station capacities. It achieves performance improvements of at least 16% over state-of-the-art approaches. A generalisation procedure further extends scalability to larger networks. By accurately modelling traffic equilibria and enabling adaptive, efficient infrastructure design, our framework advances key intelligent transportation system goals for sustainable urban mobility.