Data-driven smart charging for heterogeneous electric vehicle fleets

The ongoing electrification of mobility comes with the challenge of charging electric vehicles (EVs) sufficiently while charging infrastructure capacities are limited. Smart charging algorithms produce charge plans for individual EVs and aim to assign charging capacities fairly and efficiently between vehicles in a fleet. In practice, EV charging processes follow nonlinear charge profiles such as constant-current, constant-voltage (CCCV). Smart charging must consider charge profiles in order to avoid gaps between charge plans and actual EV power consumption. Generally valid models of charge profiles and their parameters for a diverse set of EVs are not publicly available. In this work we propose a data-driven approach for integrating a machine learning model to predict arbitrary charge profiles into a smart charging algorithm. We train machine learning models with a dataset consisting of charging processes from the workplace gathered in 2016–2018 from a heterogeneous EV fleet of 1001 EVs with 18 unique models. Each charging process includes the time series of charging power. After preprocessing, the dataset contains 10.595 charging processes leading to 1.2 million data points in total. We then compare different machine learning models for charge profile predictions finding that XGBoost yields the most accurate predictions with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 126W and a relative MAE of 0.06. Simulations show that smart charging with the integrated XGBoost model leads to a more effective infrastructure usage with up to 21% more energy charged compared to smart charging without considering charge profiles. Furthermore, an ablation study on regression model features shows the EV’s model is not a necessary attribute for accurate charge profile predictions. However, charging features are required including the number of phases used for charging.