Socially optimal charging strategies for electric vehicles

Abstract: Electric vehicles represent a promising technology for reducing emissions and dependence on fossil fuels and have started entering different automotive markets. In order to bolster their adoption by consumers and hence enhance their penetration rate, a charging station infrastructure needs to be deployed. This paper studies decentralized policies that assign electric vehicles to a network of charging stations with the goal to achieve little to no queueing. This objective is especially important for electric vehicles, whose charging times are fairly long. The social optimality of the proposed policies is established in the many-server regime, where each station is equipped with multiple charging slots. Further, convergence issues of the algorithm that achieves the optimal policy are examined. Finally, the results provide insight on how to address questions related to the optimal location deployment of the infrastructure.