Ridesharing Systems with Electric Vehicles

Ridesharing systems are encouraging drivers in their fleets to adopt electric vehicles and may therefore be able to provide not only transportation services to passengers but also energy services to power grid operators through appropriate contracts. This paper develops a queuing network model of such ridesharing platforms where drivers may decide, at any given time, whether to provide transportation or grid services based on the incentives offered by the ridesharing platform. Then it considers designing driver incentives to maximize revenue for the ridesharing platform, via an analysis of the reward structure and an optimization algorithm. Platform revenue is assessed for various system parameters under optimal incentives.