On the connection between Nash equilibria and social optima in electric vehicle charging control games

Abstract

We consider the problem of optimal charging of heterogeneous plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). We approach the problem as a multi-agent game in the presence of constraints and formulate an auxiliary minimization program whose solution is shown to be the unique Nash equilibrium of the PEV charging control game, for any finite number of possibly heterogeneous agents. Assuming that the parameters defining the constraints of each vehicle are drawn randomly from a given distribution, we show that, as the number of agents tends to infinity, the value of the game achieved by the Nash equilibrium and the social optimum of the cooperative counterpart of the problem under study coincide for almost any choice of the random heterogeneity parameters. To the best of our knowledge, this result quantifies for the first time the asymptotic behaviour of the price of anarchy for this class of games. A numerical investigation to support our result is also provided.