Boundedly Rational Hydrogen Vehicle Integration Into Prosumer Energy Sharing: Nested Equilibrium Model via Variational Inequality

Driven by the rapid proliferation of hydrogen vehicles (HVs) and the expanding adoption of prosumers equipped with distributed energy resources, power-transportation coupled networks (PTCNs) face heightened congestion and overload risks. To address these challenges, this research develops a prosumer-centric energy sharing framework that explicitly accounts for HV mobility patterns and their resultant energy demand within a nested game equilibrium context, rigorously formulated using variational inequality (VI) theory. A boundedly rational user equilibrium model, embedded in a bidirectional road network, is introduced to capture practical mixed-traffic flows and refueling behaviors under heterogeneous tolerance thresholds. Within the established energy sharing platform, prosumers voluntarily bid and trade electricity while leveraging flexible renewable energy outputs, effectively balancing mutual impacts among participants. The resulting coupled-network optimization problem is efficiently solved through a tailored projection–contraction algorithm combined with a nested fixed-point iteration. Numerical results reveal that the energy sharing mechanism reduces the overall optimality gap by 38.7% relative to the benchmark scenario and achieves an additional 55.9% enhancement compared to the self-sufficiency approach. These findings underscore the essential role of incorporating bounded rationality of HVs alongside energy sharing strategies within PTCN frameworks to ensure both operational viability and economic optimality.