Prediction of EV Charging Behavior Using Machine Learning

As a key pillar of smart transportation in smart city applications, electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming increasingly popular for their contribution in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One of the key challenges, however, is the strain on power grid infrastructure that comes with large-scale EV deployment. The solution to this lies in utilization of smart scheduling algorithms to manage the growing public charging demand. Using data-driven tools and machine learning algorithms to learn the EV charging behavior can improve scheduling algorithms. Researchers have focused on using historical charging data for predictions of behavior such as departure time and energy needs. However, variables such as weather, traffic, and nearby events, which have been neglected to a large extent, can perhaps add meaningful representations, and provide better predictions. Therefore, in this paper we propose the usage of historical charging data in conjunction with weather, traffic, and events data to predict EV session duration and energy consumption using popular machine learning algorithms including random forest, SVM, XGBoost and deep neural networks. The best predictive performance is achieved by an ensemble learning model, with SMAPE scores of 9.9% and 11.6% for session duration and energy consumptions, respectively, which improves upon the existing works in the literature. In both predictions, we demonstrate a significant improvement compared to previous work on the same dataset and we highlight the importance of traffic and weather information for charging behavior predictions.