Hierarchical Game for Electric Vehicle Public Charging Market

In this paper, we investigate the electric vehicle (EV) public charging market and especially focus on the time-based pricing mechanism for heterogeneous charging stations (CSs) and the CS allocation mechanism for EVs. As such, we develop a hierarchical game to analyze the interaction between the CSs and the EVs and then formulate it as an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints (EPEC). In the proposed game, the CSs act as the leaders who set the charging price at the upper layer and the EVs act as the followers who determine the charging behaviors at the lower layer. At the lower layer, we propose a matching game framework for the CS allocation. At the upper layer, we adopt an algorithm based on the block coordinate descent (BCD) method to solve the pricing problem for CSs. Simulation results show that our proposed framework significantly increases the revenue for the CSs and the utility for the EVs.