Uberizing the Charging Ecosystem for Electric Vehicles

In many metropolitan cities, multi-unit residential buildings (MURB) are becoming more common than single-family independent homes due to lack of urban space. MURB residents (around 42% in Europe) are potential adopters of electric vehicles (EV), but lack a private garage for EV charging. They need to exclusively rely on public charging, which currently serves only 5% of EVs. As EVs become more prevalent, the lack of extensive public charging can create a short-term demand-supply mismatch in specific city neighbourhoods, as well as preclude long-term growth in EV adoption. We believe that uberization of private garage chargers that are typically under-utilized during day-time can alleviate this problem. In this work, we examine how a charging service provider can match public charging demand with private suppliers while using a demand-response based pricing model. We base our study on real-world traffic patterns for the city of Luxembourg by augmenting the Luxembourg SUMO traffic scenario (LuST) simulator. Specifically, an EV's charging demand is modeled by a state machine with charge/discharge dynamics based on Tesla Model-S. Our preliminary results suggest that the proposed uberization strategy has the potential to gracefully handle demand spikes with higher revenue yield for a charging service provider, even while handling different categories of service users.