On fair discounted charging in electric ride-hailing markets with limited budgets

Abstract

Coordinated charging of electric vehicles (EVs) has the potential to provide significant benefits to both electric vehicle owners and the wider community. In fact, intelligent, coordinated charging of large electric fleets, such as the ones operated by ride-hailing companies, could be essential in preventing a collapse of the energy market. We study a scenario in which a central body, e.g., the power-providing company or the government, wants to influence how the EVs of different ride-hailing companies spread among different charging stations by offering discounted prices of charging. Compared to previous works in this domain, we investigate a Stackelberg-based mechanism that takes into account potentially limited discount budgets available to the companies. We propose an iterative method to compute the local Stackelberg equilibrium that guarantees fairness in the sense that we have equal prices of charging for all ride-hailing companies. Finally, we test the proposed method in a simulated case study based on taxi data from the city of Shenzhen.