An Online Continuous Progressive Second Price Auction for Electric Vehicle Charging

In this paper, we address the issue of the energy trading in the scenario of electric vehicles (EVs) charging in the smart grid. The EVs energy trading problems have attracted growing attention with the popularity of EVs. As the traditional first-reserve-first-serve scheme in the energy trading market impairs the benefits of both buyers and seller, we consider an auction scheme, called progressive second price (PSP), which has been proved to be an efficient way to conduct resource allocation in the trading market. Compared with other auction schemes, the PSP scheme can achieve both incentive compatibility and Nash equilibrium, which are important properties for the market. Nonetheless, the PSP auction scheme is not designed for online auction and it cannot guarantee that the seller can provide an enough number of charging piles to satisfy the demand of winners. To tackle these issues, in this paper we propose a novel online continuous PSP-based auction scheme, which is capable of not only achieving the property of online energy trading but also guaranteeing that the number of winners is limited to be no more than the number of charging piles. Further, we prove that our auction scheme achieves incentive compatibility and Nash equilibrium. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our auction scheme achieves good performance with respect to social welfare, the seller satisfaction ratio, the buyer satisfaction ratio, as well as computation overhead.