Customer-Centric Method and System for Pricing Options and Pricing/Charging Co-Optimization at Multiple Plug-In Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

A station-level framework to operate one or multiple plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) charging stations with optimal pricing policy and charge scheduling, which incorporates human behavior to capture the driver charging decision process. The user is presented with menu of price-differentiated charging services, which differ in per-unit price and the energy delivery schedule. Involving human in the loop dynamics, the operation model results in the alleviation of the overstay issue may occur when a charging session has completed. A multi-block convex transformation is used to reformulate the resulting non-convex problem via the Fenchel-Young Inequality and a Block Coordinate Descent algorithm is applied to solve the overall problem with an efficiency which enables real-time implementation. The pricing control policy realizes benefits in three aspects: (i) net profits gain, (ii) overstay reduction, and (iii) increased quality-of-service.