Blockchain-enabled electric vehicle orderly charging optimization

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of electric vehicles (EVs) urges charging station operators (CSOs) to expand their networks. However, currently CSOs operate independent EV charging service platforms separately, which poses inconvenience for EV users and hinders the efficient utilization of charging infrastructure. This paper introduces a consortium blockchain-enabled EV charging service platform (CB-EVCSP), which leverages novel orderly charging guidance models (OCGMs) encoded as smart contracts to integrate and coordinate the efforts of CSOs. The CB-EVCSP not only mitigates trust and security concerns but also enhances the utilization of charging facilities. Both multinomial logit (MNL) and mixed MNL models are developed to characterize the interaction between charging station recommendations and EV users’ choice behaviors, where a coefficient of variation based fairness criterion is used to ensure distribution fairness. We provide equivalent reformulations and design efficient constraint generation algorithms. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed models and algorithms.

Keywords:

• Electric vehicle
• orderly charging management
• blockchain
• smart contract
• constraint generation algorithm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Website of ChargeBar: https://admin.bjev520.com/jsp/beiqi/pcmap/do/pcMap.jsp?chargingTypeId=&companyId=&chargingBrandId=0&brandStatuId=&cityName=/%E5/%8C/%97/%E4/%BA/%AC, accessed between March 4 and April 10, 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [number 71871023, 72271029, and 72061127001]; National Science and Technology Innovation 2030 - Major program under Grant 2022ZD0115403; and Science and Technology Innovation Project of Beijing Institute of Technology.