Flexible Electric Vehicle Charging with Karma

TL;DR

This paper introduces a non-monetary karma-based system for real-time, fair, and efficient electric vehicle charging management, balancing urgency and deadlines through online karma auctions.

Contribution

It extends karma Dynamic Population Game models to EV charging with new SOC dynamics and trip deadlines, ensuring a stationary Nash equilibrium and improved scheduling.

Findings

Karma economy guarantees a stationary Nash equilibrium.

The system balances deadlines and urgency effectively.

Outperforms benchmark scheduling schemes.

Abstract

Motivated by the need to develop fair and efficient schemes to facilitate the electrification of transport, this paper proposes a non-monetary karma economy for flexible Electric Vehicle (EV) charging, managing the intertemporal allocation of limited power capacity. We consider a charging facility with limited capacity that must schedule arriving EVs to charge in real-time. For this purpose, the facility adopts online karma auctions, in which each EV user is endowed with non-tradable karma tokens, places a karma bid in each time interval it is present in the facility, and capacity is allocated to the highest bidders, who must pay their bids. These payments are subsequently redistributed to the users to form a closed, indefinitely sustainable economy. The main contribution is to extend previous karma Dynamic Population Game (DPG) formulations to this setting which features novel State of Charge (SOC) dynamics and private trip deadlines in addition to urgency. A Stationary Nash Equilibrium (SNE) of the EV charging karma economy is guaranteed to exist, and it is demonstrated to provide pronounced benefits with respect to benchmark scheduling schemes as it balances between meeting deadlines and prioritizing high urgency.