Pricing Differentiated Services in an Electric Vehicle Public Charging Station Network

Abstract

We study the decision problem faced by a Charging Network Operator (CNO) that owns a network of Electric Vehicle (EV) public charging stations and offers a menu of differentiated services to its users. Specifically, we design optimal pricing and routing schemes for the setting where users cannot directly choose which station they can charge their vehicle at. Instead, they choose their priority level and energy request amount from the menu, and then the CNO directly assigns them to a station nearby. In designing our optimal pricing-routing policies, we consider the heterogeneity of the stations locations, electricity prices, and capacity, as well as the heterogeneity of users' values of time and energy requests. We design prices that incentivize users to reveal their true preferences to the CNO, as well as optimal routing schemes to allocate them to charging stations, under the scenario where the CNO is a social welfare maximizing entity.