Decentralized Assignment of Electric Vehicles at Charging Stations Based on Personalized Cost Functions and Distributed Ledger Technologies

In this article, we propose a stochastic decentralized algorithm to recommend the most convenient charging station (CS) to plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) that need charging. In particular, we use different cost functions to describe the possibly different priorities of PEV drivers, such as the preference to minimize charging costs, charging times, or the distance between them and the CS. For this purpose, we leverage on an Internet of Things architecture based on a permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) to enforce compliance of drivers and reduces the occurrence of detrimental misbehaviors of drivers. Extensive simulations performed with the mobility simulator SUMO in realistic city-wide networks have been provided to illustrate how the proposed PEV assignment procedure works in practice, and to validate its performance.