A fair and low-carbon V2G scheduling framework based on carbon-economic contracts and fulfillment-aware dispatch

The large-scale integration of electric vehicles (EVs) offers significant flexibility for the low-carbon transition of power systems. However, effectively incentivizing heterogeneous users with private characteristics to participate in vehicle-to-grid (V2G), while ensuring efficient and fair scheduling remains a key challenge for virtual power plants (VPPs). To address this, we propose a V2G scheduling framework based on contract theory, targeting both carbon reduction and economic objectives. First, we integrate the carbon inclusion (CI) concept into contract theory to design a differentiated incentive mechanism. This mechanism not only leverages both economic rewards and environmental value to motivate heterogeneous users, but also resolves information asymmetry. Second, to achieve efficient and fair scheduling of large-scale EV fleets, we design a two-stage aggregate-disaggregate framework. In the aggregation stage, we propose a real-time optimization method based on a Beta soft Actor-Critic algorithm, specifically adapted for the bounded action space of contract-based V2G. In the disaggregation stage, we design a fair dispatch policy, based on a fulfillment progress deviation index to dynamically balance contract fulfillment progress among EVs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed incentive mechanism significantly enhances the VPP's economic and environmental benefits, and the fair dispatch policy substantially improves fairness while maintaining high system performance.