Where to get a charged EV battery: A route to follow as if it were your own advice

We address the problem of Electric Vehicle (EV) drivers' assistance through ITS. Drivers of EVs that are low in battery may ask a navigation service for advice on which charging station to use and which route to take. A rational driver will follow the advice if there is no alternative choice that lets her reach its destination in a shorter time, i.e., in game-theory terms, if such advice corresponds to a Nash-equilibrium strategy. Thus, we envision two game-theoretic models, namely, a congestion game and a game with congestion-averse utilities, both known to admit at least one pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. The former represents a practical scenario with a high level of realism, although at a high computational price. The latter neglects some features of the real-world scenario but it exhibits very low complexity, and is shown to be an excellent approximation of the former. Importantly, we show that the average per-EV trip time yielded by the Nash equilibria is very close to the one attained by solving a centralized optimization problem that minimizes such a quantity.