Where to get a charged EV battery: A route to follow as if it were your own advice

We address the problem of Electric Vehicle (EV) drivers´ assistance through ITS. Drivers of EVs that are low in battery may ask a navigation service for advice on which charging station to use and which route to take. A rational driver will follow the advice if there is no alternative choice that lets her reach its destination in a shorter time, i.e., in game-theory terms, if such advice corresponds to a Nash-equilibrium strategy. Thus, we envision two game-theoretic models, namely, a congestion game and a game with congestion-averse utilities, both known to admit at least one pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. The former represents a practical scenario with a high level of realism, although at a high computational price. The latter neglects some features of the real-world scenario but it exhibits very low complexity, and is shown to be an excellent approximation of the former. Importantly, we show that the average per-EV trip time yielded by the Nash equilibria is very close to the one attained by solving a centralized optimization problem that minimizes such a quantity.