Opportunistic Energy Sharing Between Power Grid and Electric Vehicles: A Game Theory-Based Pricing Policy

Electric vehicles (EVs) have great potential to reduce dependency on fossil fuels. The recent surge in the development of online EV (OLEV) will help to address the drawbacks associated with current generation EVs, such as the heavy and expensive batteries. OLEVs are integrated with the smart grid of power infrastructure through a wireless power transfer system (WPT) to increase the driving range of the OLEV. However, the integration of OLEVs with the grid creates a tremendous load for the smart grid. The demand of a power grid changes over time and the price of power is not fixed throughout the day. There should be some congestion avoidance and load balancing policy implications to ensure quality of services for OLEVs. In this paper, first, we conduct an analysis to show the existence of unpredictable power load and congestion because of OLEVs. We use the Simulation for Urban MObility tool and hourly traffic counts of a road section of the New York City to analyze the amount of energy OLEVs can receive at different times of the day. Then, we present a game theory based on a distributed power schedule framework to find the optimal schedule between OLEVs and smart grid. In the proposed framework, OLEVs receive the amount of power charging from the smart grid based on a power payment function which is updated using best response strategy. We prove that the updated power requests converge to the optimal power schedule. In this way, the smart grid maximizes the social welfare of OLEVs, which is defined as mixed consideration of total satisfaction and its power charging cost. Finally, we verify the performance of our proposed pricing policy under different scenarios in a simulation study.