Electric vehicle charging pricing design for agent-based traffic microsimulation

Over the past few years, electric vehicles (EVs) have become a popular mode of individual transportation due to their significant benefits over internal combustion engine vehicles, resulting in significant growth in their penetration rate. However, the current flat electricity charging pricing and rapid diffusion of EVs may impose challenges to both transportation systems and power grids. It is well-accepted that the implementation of charging pricing schemes is a promising solution for changing and controlling EV users’ charging behavior. Nevertheless, in most research studies that have examined pricing schemes, the charging logic is defined in a way that agents will charge their vehicles while performing their daily activities. This will make the application of pricing schemes unfeasible, as agents will not have the freedom to unplug their EVs whenever they want, to reduce their billing costs. Accordingly, this paper provides an agent and activity-based framework for charging pricing schemes by decoupling activity and charging start and end times. Following this, three different charging pricing schemes have been introduced, including time of use (TOU), non-linear and zonal pricing and tested on the Montreal scenario.