Dynamic Pricing for Electric Vehicle Extreme Fast Charging

TLDR

Electric vehicle technology, especially extreme fast charging, has advanced rapidly, yet widespread deployment remains hindered by limited fast‑charging station availability. The study proposes a fast‑charging sharing system that incentivizes owners to share chargers, requiring a smart dynamic pricing scheme to maximize long‑term profit. Dynamic pricing is modeled as a Markov decision process, and several algorithmic schemes are introduced for various application scenarios. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes, yielding useful insights into dynamic pricing for fast charging.

Abstract

Significant developments and advancement pertaining to electric vehicle (EV) technologies, such as extreme fast charging (XFC), have been witnessed in the last decade. However, there are still many challenges to the wider deployment of EVs. One of the major barriers is its availability of fast charging stations. A possible solution is to build a fast charging sharing system, by encouraging small business owners or even householders to install and share their fast charging devices, by reselling electricity energy sourced from traditional utility companies or their own solar grid. To incentivize such a system, a smart dynamic pricing scheme is needed to facilitate those growing markets with fast charging stations. The pricing scheme is expected to take into account the dynamics intertwined with pricing, demand, and environment factors, in an effort to maximize the long-term profit with the optimal price. To this end, this paper formulates the problem of dynamic pricing for fast charging as a Markov decision process and accordingly proposes several algorithmic schemes for different applications. Experimental study is conducted with useful and interesting insights.