Online mechanism design for electric vehicle charging

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are expected to place a considerable strain on local electricity distribution networks, requiring charging to be coordinated in order to accommodate capacity constraints. We design a novel online auction protocol for this problem, wherein vehicle owners use agents to bid for power and also state time windows in which a vehicle is available for charging. This is a multi-dimensional mechanism design domain, with owners having non-increasing marginal valuations for each subsequent unit of electricity. In our design, we couple a greedy allocation algorithm with the occasional “burning” of allocated power, leaving it unallocated, in order to adjust an allocation and achieve monotonicity and thus truthfulness. We consider two variations: burning at each time step or on-departure. Both mechanisms are evaluated in depth, using data from a real-world trial of electric vehicles in the UK to simulate system dynamics and valuations. The mechanisms provide high...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Enrico H. Gerding, Valentin Robu, Sebastian Stein, David C. Parkes, Alex Rogers, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: ATAL 2011, Electricity Distribution Networks, Hybrid Electric Vehicles, Intelligent Agents, Multiagent Systems