TY - GEN
T1 - An online mechanism for multi-speed electric vehicle charging
AU - Robu, Valentin
AU - Stein, Sebastian
AU - Gerding, Enrico H.
AU - Parkes, David C.
AU - Rogers, Alex
AU - Jennings, Nicholas R.
PY - 2012/11/8
Y1 - 2012/11/8
N2 - As plug-in electric vehicles become more widespread, their charging needs to be coordinated, in order to ensure that capacity constraints are not exceeded. This is becoming particularly critical as new fast-charging technologies are being developed that place additional burden on local transformers. To address this problem, we propose a novel online mechanism in which agents representing vehicle owners are incentivised to be truthful not only about their marginal valuations for electricity units, but also about their arrival, departure and maximum charging speeds. The work extends the state of the art in several ways. We develop an online, model-free mechanism that handles multi-unit demand per period, thus accommodating vehicles with heterogeneous and flexible charging speeds; we provide competitive worst-case bounds for our mechanism; finally, we simulate the proposed online mechanism using data from a real-world trial of electric vehicles in the UK, showing that using fast charging leads to significant cost savings.
AB - As plug-in electric vehicles become more widespread, their charging needs to be coordinated, in order to ensure that capacity constraints are not exceeded. This is becoming particularly critical as new fast-charging technologies are being developed that place additional burden on local transformers. To address this problem, we propose a novel online mechanism in which agents representing vehicle owners are incentivised to be truthful not only about their marginal valuations for electricity units, but also about their arrival, departure and maximum charging speeds. The work extends the state of the art in several ways. We develop an online, model-free mechanism that handles multi-unit demand per period, thus accommodating vehicles with heterogeneous and flexible charging speeds; we provide competitive worst-case bounds for our mechanism; finally, we simulate the proposed online mechanism using data from a real-world trial of electric vehicles in the UK, showing that using fast charging leads to significant cost savings.
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-30913-7_22
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-30913-7_22
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9783642309120
T3 - Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
SP - 100
EP - 112
BT - Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications
A2 - Coles, Peter
PB - Springer
ER -