A Physics-Informed and Attention-Based Graph Learning Approach for Regional Electric Vehicle Charging Demand Prediction

Along with the proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs), optimizing the use of EV charging space can significantly alleviate the growing load on intelligent transportation systems. As the foundation to achieve such an optimization, a spatiotemporal method for EV charging demand prediction in urban areas is required. Although several solutions have been proposed by using data-driven deep learning methods, it can be that these performance-oriented approaches may struggle to correctly understand the underlying factors influencing charging demand, particularly charging prices. A representative case that highlights the challenge faced by existing methods is their potential misinterpretation of high prices during peak times, leading to an incorrect assumption that higher prices correspond to increased demand. To address the challenges associated with training an accurate and reliable prediction model for EV charging demand, this paper proposes a novel approach called PAG, which leverages the integration of graph and temporal attention mechanisms for effective feature extraction and introduces physics-informed meta-learning in the pre-training step to facilitate prior knowledge learning. Evaluation results on a dataset of 18,061 EV charging piles in Shenzhen, China, show that the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art forecasting performance and the ability to understand the adaptive changes in charging demands caused by price fluctuations.