Electric Vehicle Charging Guidance Strategy Considering “Traffic Network-Charging Station-Driver” Modeling: A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Approach

EV drivers have experienced a charging inconvenience due to a limited number of charging facilities and mileage anxiety due to the limited driving distance for a single full charge. This paper developed a user-friendly online EV charging guidance algorithm to cope with the two aforementioned issues using multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. First, three models, i.e., the traffic network model, charging station model, and EV driver model, are established, respectively, considering the traffic condition, the potential competition of future charging demand at charging stations, and the drivers’ mileage anxiety. Second, the charging guidance process is modeled as a Markov decision process, and charging stations are taken as agents. The attentional multi-agent actor-critic algorithm based on the centralized training with decentralized execution framework is built. Finally, compared to the comparison algorithm, the performance does not diminish with the increase in the number of agents, indicating that the approach has the scalability to be applied to large-scale agent systems. The model still has the generalization in extreme scenarios such as traffic road and charger failures. The testing time within various numbers of charging stations is about 23ms per EV, which is sufficient to apply the proposed model to real-time decision-making and online recommendation.