Personalised electric vehicle charging stop planning through online estimators

Abstract In this paper, we address the problem of finding charging stops while travelling in electric vehicles (EVs) using artificial intelligence (AI). Choosing a charging station is challenging, because drivers have very heterogeneous preferences in terms of how they trade off the features of various alternatives (for example, regarding the time spent driving, charging costs, waiting times at charging stations, and the facilities provided at the charging stations). The key problem here is eliciting the diverse preferences of drivers, assuming that these preferences are typically not fully known a priori, and then planning stops based on each driver’s preferences. Our approach to solving this problem is to develop an intelligent personal agent that learns preferences gradually over multiple interactions. This study proposes a new technique that utilises a small-scale discrete choice experiment as a method of interacting with the driver in order to minimise the cognitive burden on the driver. Using this method, drivers are presented with a variety of routes with possible combinations of charging stops depending on the agent’s latest belief about their preferences. In subsequent iterations, the personal agent will continue to learn and refine its belief about the driver’s preferences, suggesting more personalised routes that are closer to the driver’s preferences. Based on real preference data from EV drivers, we evaluate our novel algorithm and show that, after only a few queries, our method quickly converges to the optimal routes for EV drivers [This paper is an extended version of an ECAI workshop short paper (Shafipour Yourdshahi et al., in: ECAI 2023 workshops, Kraków, Poland, 2023)].