Coordinating Charging Request Allocation Between Self-Interested Navigation Service Platforms.

This article focuses on the allocation of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations among self-interested navigation service platforms, modeled as the Fleet Charging Station Allocation (FCSA) game. The study demonstrates that the FCSA game lacks guaranteed pure Nash equilibria, motivating the use of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms—both offline and online—to coordinate platforms’ strategies and improve social outcomes. Through extensive simulations based on Berlin’s charging infrastructure, the authors show that VCG coordination can reduce the overall social cost by up to 52% offline and 42% online, with a data-driven online policy outperforming a greedy approach by up to 55% in congested scenarios. The work also explores weighted VCG mechanisms to balance benefits among heterogeneous platforms and highlights trade-offs between individual platform payoffs and system-wide efficiency.