Introduction

This is the webpage for the seminar of the Intelligent Systems (IS) research group at CWI. For information or questions, please contact the seminar organizer Peter Bosman.

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Date/Time/Location: November 22, 2012 / 15:00 / L016
Speaker: Valentin Robu (Agents, Intelligence, Multimedia Research Group, University of Southampton)
Title: Online Mechanism Design for Dynamic Electric Vehicle Charging
Abstract: Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are expected to place a considerable strain on local electricity distribution networks, requiring charging to be coordinated in order to accommodate capacity constraints. We design a novel online auction protocol for this problem, wherein vehicle owners use agents to bid for power and also state time windows in which a vehicle is available for charging. This is a multi-dimensional mechanism design domain, with owners having non-increasing marginal valuations for each subsequent unit of electricity. In our design, we couple a greedy allocation algorithm with the occasional cancellation of allocated power, in order to achieve monotonicity and thus truthfulness. We consider two variations: burning at each time step or on-departure. Both mechanisms are evaluated in depth, using data from a real-world trial of electric vehicles in the UK to simulate system dynamics and valuations. The mechanisms provide higher allocative efficiency than a fixed price system, are almost competitive with a standard scheduling heuristic which assumes non-strategic agents, and can sustain a substantially larger number of vehicles at the same per-owner fuel cost saving than a simple random scheme.

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