Optimal Pricing for Efficient Electric Vehicle Charging Station Management

The rapid development of Electric Vehicles (EVs) seen in recent years has been drawing increasing attentions from the public, markets, decision-makers, and academia. Notwithstanding the progress, issues still remain. Because of the widely complained disadvantages of limited battery capacity and long charging time, charging convenience has become a top concern that greatly hinders the adoption of EVs. Specialized EV charging station, which provides more than 10 times faster charging speed than domestic charging, is therefore a critical element for successful EV promotion. While most existing researches focus on optimizing spatial placement of charging stations, they are inflexible and inefficient against rapidly changing urban structure and traffic pattern. Therefore, this paper approaches the management of EV charging stations from the pricing perspective as a more flexible and adaptive complement to established charging station placement. In this paper, we build a realistic pricing model in consideration of residential travel pattern and EV drivers’ self-interested charging behavior, traffic congestion, and operating expense of charging stations. We formulate the pricing problem as a mixed integer non-convex optimization problem, and propose a scalable algorithm to solve it. Experiments on both mock and real data are also conducted, which show scalability of our algorithm as well as our solution’s significant improvement over existing approaches.