Auc2Charge

Abstract

The increasing market share of electric vehicles (EVs) makes large-scale charging stations indispensable infrastructure for integrating EVs into the future smart grid. Thus their operation modes have drawn great attention from researchers. One promising mode called park-and-charge was recently proposed. It allows people to park their EVs at a parking lot, where EVs can get charged during the parking time. This mode has been experimented and demonstrated in small scale. However, the missing of an efficient market mechanism is an important gap preventing its large-scale deployment. Existing pricing policies, e.g., pay-by-use and flatrate pricing, would jeopardize the efficiency of electricity allocation and the corresponding social welfare in the parkand-charge mode, and thus are inapplicable. To find an efficient mechanism, this paper explores the feasibility and benefits of utilizing auction mechanism in the EV park-andcharge mode. The auction allows EV users to submit and update bids on their charging demand to the charging station, which makes corresponding electricity allocation and pricing decisions. To this end, we propose Auc2Charge, an online auction framework. Auc2Charge is truthful and individual rational. Running in polynomial time, it provides an efficient electricity allocation for EV users with a close-form approximation ratio on system social welfare. Through both theoretical analysis and numerical simulation, we demonstrate the efficacy of Auc2Charge in terms of social welfare and user satisfaction.

Applications of mechanism design in market-based demand-side management: A review

“…This payment rule ensures that the best strategy for agents who act selfishly is to report their private information truthfully. Many of the MD-DSM approaches are based on VCG [22,25,30,35,36,41,43,45,46,58,59,[65][66][67]70,74,83,89]. Although VCG can guarantee economic efficiency and incentive compatibility, it raises privacy and comfort concerns when applied to electricity market settings due to its direct revelation and central allocation structure.…”