Boolean Games for Charging Electric Vehicles

Electric Vehicles (EVs) must coordinate their charging time-slots in order to balance the load of the smart grid. The present paper models the coordination of charging among EV agents as a Boolean game, where the balancing of the global load is achieved by a principal through the use of environment variables. The iterative Boolean game of charging and avoiding overload is defined and two families of strategies for the principal are proposed. The global goal is to have no overloaded time-slots. Personal goals of agents are composed of their preferred time-slots. To achieve the global goal, the principal informs selected agents of overloaded time-slots through their environment variables. One family of strategies for the principal is shown to always converge to a solution, where the global goal of no overloaded time-slot is achieved. The other family of strategies attempts to achieve the personal goals of all the agents. An experimental evaluation of the two families of strategies on randomly generated EV charging games is presented. The proposed strategies quickly reach a solution that achieves the global goal and a large majority of the agents' personal goals.