Accommodating More Users in Highway Electric Vehicle Charging through Coordinated Booking: A Market-Based Approach

This paper presents a coordinated booking mechanism for highway electric vehicle charging management. The mechanism improves charging facility utilization and user satisfaction through coordinating users' charging schedules based on their travel time flexibility and required charging time for their trip. Given that users compete for limited charging resources to obtain their preferred schedules, we model them as self-interested agents who consider their flexibility as their private information and may be reluctant to reveal it to the scheduler. In order to compute high-quality schedules, we propose a market-based scheduling mechanism which motivates users to reveal their flexibility. This mechanism is implemented using an iterative bidding procedure which allows users to progressively reveal their feasible travel time windows as needed. The goal is to maximize the number of served users given limited charging capacity and users' travel time window constraints. Our computational study shows that the proposed booking mechanism achieves on average 90% efficiency compared with optimal solutions. We also observe that high efficiency solutions usually require more flexibility information to be revealed by the users.