Plug-in Electric Vehicle Charging With Multiple Charging Options: A Systematic Analysis of Service Providers' Pricing Strategies

In this article, we present the optimal strategy for public plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) charging services with multiple charging options: fast charging service and slow charging service. The PEV user make decisions by firstly considering the remaining energy, travel distance to charging station, then about the charging prices, charging rates and estimated charging time. To obtain insights of such a highly coupled system, we consider both monopoly and duopoly markets, where the two services are operated by a single service provider (SP) and two different SPs, respectively. For the monopoly market, we propose a three-stage Stackelberg game model. For the duopoly market, we propose a two-stage Bertrand competition and Cournot competition. We provided the SP's optimal pricing strategies and decisions in the monopoly market, and the optimal pricing contract and quantity contract for SPs in the duopoly market with Bertrand competition and Cournot competition. Both the analytical and simulation results show that, in the monopoly market, offering two charging options can potentially improve the SP's profit compared with offering one option only in the monopoly market; while in the duopoly market, it is optimal for SPs to offer the quantity contract rather than the price contract to maximize profits.

Automated summary

This article presents the optimal strategy for public plug-in electric vehicle charging services, discussing pricing and contract choices in monopoly and duopoly markets. Analytical results show that offering two charging options can increase profits in a monopoly market, while providing quantity contracts is optimal for SPs in a duopoly market.