A Game Approach for EV Brands' Investment Planning of Battery Swapping Stations

In the current market of energy supply for electric vehicles (EVs), charging stations (CSs) have a definitely high market share, while the battery swapping stations (BSSs) are rapidly developed in recent years due to their potential to save users' waiting time by replacing a depleted battery with a fully-charged one. In order to assess the benefits of battery swapping, an economic model is needed to analyze the market, and different EV brands need to determine the optimal investment plans of BSSs in order to maximize their individual revenues. This paper proposes a Stackelberg game to characterize the interactions between different EV brands, CSs, BSSs, and EV consumers. By analyzing the Nash Equilibrium of the Stackelberg game, a pricing scheme for BSSs is proposed and EV brands' specific profit model from BSSs is formulated to analyze the optimal investment plan of BSSs. Experimental results show that our model and strategy improve EV brands' profits, especially for brands with moderate battery capacity, moderate car price and large sales volume.