Distributed Auction-Based Incentive Mechanism for Energy Trading Between Electric Vehicles and Mobile Charging Stations

With the increasing number of electric vehicles, deploying fixed charging stations (FCSs) has been a widely adopted solution for providing charging services to EVs. However, the charging requirement of EVs being near overload FCSs and/or in areas of inadequate charging infrastructures such as highways and rural areas will surpass the capabilities of FCSs. To address this challenge, the realized peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading between electric vehicles (EVs) and mobile charging stations (MCSs) can be utilized to relieve the overload on FCSs, leverage under-utilized energy resources among cities and achieve trading benefits. By deploying this energy trading model, EVs purchase available energy from MCSs instead of FCSs to fulfill their charging demands. However, such an energy trade requires an incentive mechanism to ensure fair trading and prevent personal gain, which motivates us to study the incentive mechanism design for the energy trading model. In this paper, first, we consider an energy trading system involving multiple MCSs and EVs. Then, we formulate the incentive mechanism between MCSs and EVs as an auction game, in which the MCSs are auctioneers and EVs are bidders. In the formulated problem, each EV secretly submits its bid to MCSs, and each MCS distributively decides the winners without the knowledge of other MCSs. To achieve this, we design a distributed action-based energy trading mechanism that ensures fairness of providing charging service, validity in trading price’s resource determination, and nothing incentivizing the EVs to cheat on payment decisions. The proposed energy trading scheme achieves certain critical properties, including truthfulness, individual rationality, budget balance, and computational efficiency for both buyers and sellers. Finally, we perform simulation experiments to verify the proposed scheme’s effectiveness compared with the baseline in the literature.