A Game of Incentives

With the explosive penetration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the last decade, the load on the existing grids have exaggerated manifold. This has led to severe demand-supply imbalances causing grid instability and reliability issues. Towards this end, Demand Reponse (DR) management has been identified as an important means to tackle this problem. Thus, in this paper, a robust Stackelberg Game has been proposed wherein the Utility Provider (UP) and fleet of EVs are assumed to be playing the roles of a competitive leader and followers, respectively. In the considered game, EVs charging problem has been formulated as a non-cooperative game; in which EVs decide their charging slot in accordance with the real-time electricity prices announced by the UP. The existence and uniqueness of the formulated Stackelberg Game has been theoretically proved in the paper. Further, the efficacy of the formulated game has been validated on real-time data traces obtained from Haryana State Electricity Board, India.