Incorporating Range Anxiety into Electric Vehicle Highway Charging Decisions: A Bayesian Game Analysis✱

Abstract

As the penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) increases, highway charging has become an increasing concern for EV drivers. The improvement of EV highway charging requires analysis of EV drivers’ charging decisions. However, range anxiety, the fear of running out of electricity before reaching the next charging station, is mostly ignored by literature studying EV charging behaviors on highways. In this paper, the impact of EV drivers’ subjective range anxiety on highway charging is explicitly accounted for. In particular, a non-cooperative Bayes game is formulated between EV drivers in which each driver decides whether to charge. In this game, EV drivers seek to minimize costs, including the charging fee, range anxiety, and queuing time. A novel approach based on Prospect Theory is proposed to incorporate the impact of EV drivers’ range anxiety on charging decisions. To analyze the game insights, we prove the existence and uniqueness of Bayes Nash Equilibrium (BNE) in the symmetric two-player case, and propose an algorithm to solve the BNE. Numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the effect of range anxiety on charging decisions. In particular, the charging decisions depend significantly on the drivers’ risk aversion tendencies.