Flexible Electric Vehicle Charging with Karma
This addresses the challenge of managing limited charging capacity for EV users in a fair and efficient manner, representing an incremental extension of existing karma game formulations.
The paper tackles the problem of fair and efficient scheduling for electric vehicle charging at capacity-limited facilities by introducing a non-monetary karma economy with online auctions, where EVs bid karma tokens to allocate capacity. It demonstrates that this approach guarantees a Stationary Nash Equilibrium and provides significant benefits over benchmarks by balancing deadline adherence and urgency prioritization.
Motivated by the need to develop fair and efficient schemes to facilitate the electrification of transport, this paper proposes a non-monetary karma economy for flexible Electric Vehicle (EV) charging, managing the intertemporal allocation of limited power capacity. We consider a charging facility with limited capacity that must schedule arriving EVs to charge in real-time. For this purpose, the facility adopts online karma auctions, in which each EV user is endowed with non-tradable karma tokens, places a karma bid in each time interval it is present in the facility, and capacity is allocated to the highest bidders, who must pay their bids. These payments are subsequently redistributed to the users to form a closed, indefinitely sustainable economy. The main contribution is to extend previous karma Dynamic Population Game (DPG) formulations to this setting which features novel State of Charge (SOC) dynamics and private trip deadlines in addition to urgency. A Stationary Nash Equilibrium (SNE) of the EV charging karma economy is guaranteed to exist, and it is demonstrated to provide pronounced benefits with respect to benchmark scheduling schemes as it balances between meeting deadlines and prioritizing high urgency.