An Incentive-Compatible Combinatorial Auction Design for Charging Network Scheduling of Battery Electric Vehicles

Charging network scheduling for battery electric vehicles is a challenging research issue on deciding where and when to activate users’ charging under the constraints imposed by their time availability and energy demands, as well as the limited available capacities provided by the charging stations. Moreover, users’ strategic behaviors and untruthful revelation on their real preferences on charging schedules pose additional challenges to efficiently coordinate their charging in a market setting, where users are reasonably modelled as self-interested agents who strive to maximize their own utilities rather than the system-wide efficiency. To tackle these challenges, we propose an incentive-compatible combinatorial auction for charging network scheduling in a decentralized environment. In such a structured framework, users can bid for their preferred destination and charging time at different stations, and the scheduling specific problem solving structure is also embedded into the winner determination model to coordinate the charging at multiple stations. The objective is to maximize the social welfare across all users which is represented by their total values of scheduled finishing time. The Vickrey–Clarke–Groves payment rule is adopted to incentivize users to truthfully disclose their true preferences as a weakly dominant strategy. Moreover, the proposed auction is proved to be individually rational and weakly budget balanced through an extensive game-theoretical analysis. We also present a case study to demonstrate its applicability to real-world charging reservation scenarios using the charging network data from Manhattan, New York City.