Collaborative Pricing in a Power-Transportation Coupled Network: A Variational Inequality Approach

This paper proposes a new collaborative pricing scheme for a power-transportation coupled network based on the variational inequality (VI) approach. In the proposed scheme, nodal electricity prices and congestion tolls on roads and at charging stations are considered to coordinate the coupled networks in order to minimize the operational cost of the whole system. The prices are determined by a second-order cone-based AC power flow model and a mixed user equilibrium model, respectively. A collaborative pricing model (CPM) is then built based on the two models and the interactions between them. In order to avoid the intractability of the developed non-convex model, the CPM is transformed into the VI formulation. With proven existence and uniqueness of solutions of the VI formulation, a new prediction-correction algorithm is proposed to accelerate the solution of the CPM problem, which is guaranteed to converge to the optimal solution. The proposed models and algorithm are verified using case studies on a real-world test system. The results show that the proposed pricing scheme can reduce the operational cost and the proposed algorithm shows improved convergence and higher computation efficiency compared with the existing algorithms.