The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

A model-based online mechanism with pre-commitment and its application to electric vehicle charging

A model-based online mechanism with pre-commitment and its application to electric vehicle charging
A model-based online mechanism with pre-commitment and its application to electric vehicle charging
We introduce a novel online mechanism that schedules the allocation of an expiring and continuously-produced resource to self-interested agents with private preferences. A key application of our mechanism is the charging of pure electric vehicles, where owners arrive dynamically over time, and each owner requires a minimum amount of charge by its departure to complete its next trip. To truthfully elicit the agents' preferences in this setting, we introduce the new concept of pre-commitment: Whenever an agent is selected, our mechanism pre-commits to charging the vehicle by its reported departure time, but maintains flexibility about when the charging takes place and at what rate. Furthermore, to make effective allocation decisions we use a model-based approach by modifying Consensus, a well-known online optimisation algorithm. We show that our pre-commitment mechanism with modified Consensus incentivises truthful reporting. Furthermore, through simulations based on real-world data, we show empirically that the average utility achieved by our mechanism is 93% or more of the offline optimal.
electric vehicles, mechanism design, pricing
0-9817381-2-5
669-676
Stein, Sebastian
cb2325e7-5e63-475e-8a69-9db2dfbdb00b
Gerding, Enrico
d9e92ee5-1a8c-4467-a689-8363e7743362
Robu, Valentin
36b30550-208e-48d4-8f0e-8ff6976cf566
Jennings, Nick
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
Stein, Sebastian
cb2325e7-5e63-475e-8a69-9db2dfbdb00b
Gerding, Enrico
d9e92ee5-1a8c-4467-a689-8363e7743362
Robu, Valentin
36b30550-208e-48d4-8f0e-8ff6976cf566
Jennings, Nick
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30

Stein, Sebastian, Gerding, Enrico, Robu, Valentin and Jennings, Nick (2012) A model-based online mechanism with pre-commitment and its application to electric vehicle charging. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2012)), Valencina, Spain. 04 - 08 Jun 2012. pp. 669-676 .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

We introduce a novel online mechanism that schedules the allocation of an expiring and continuously-produced resource to self-interested agents with private preferences. A key application of our mechanism is the charging of pure electric vehicles, where owners arrive dynamically over time, and each owner requires a minimum amount of charge by its departure to complete its next trip. To truthfully elicit the agents' preferences in this setting, we introduce the new concept of pre-commitment: Whenever an agent is selected, our mechanism pre-commits to charging the vehicle by its reported departure time, but maintains flexibility about when the charging takes place and at what rate. Furthermore, to make effective allocation decisions we use a model-based approach by modifying Consensus, a well-known online optimisation algorithm. We show that our pre-commitment mechanism with modified Consensus incentivises truthful reporting. Furthermore, through simulations based on real-world data, we show empirically that the average utility achieved by our mechanism is 93% or more of the offline optimal.

Text
camera_ready_final.pdf - Other
Download (157kB)

More information

Published date: June 2012
Venue - Dates: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2012)), Valencina, Spain, 2012-06-04 - 2012-06-08
Keywords: electric vehicles, mechanism design, pricing
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 273082
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/273082
ISBN: 0-9817381-2-5
PURE UUID: 3d02129f-0520-4cf2-aa82-96a8e5cb2208
ORCID for Sebastian Stein: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-2858-8857
ORCID for Enrico Gerding: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-7200-552X

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 02 Jan 2012 10:53
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:30

Export record

Contributors

Author: Sebastian Stein ORCID iD
Author: Enrico Gerding ORCID iD
Author: Valentin Robu
Author: Nick Jennings

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×