Adaptive primal–dual Q-learning for electric vehicle route optimization on real-world charging networks

Abstract Electric Vehicles (EVs) are emerging as sustainable alternatives to internal combustion engine vehicles; however, efficient route planning remains a major challenge due to limited driving range, sparse charging infrastructure, and variable energy consumption patterns. Traditional shortest-path algorithms, such as Dijkstra’s and A*, often fail to account for EV-specific factors, including charging station availability, connector compatibility, and energy constraints. This study presents a comprehensive EV route optimization framework that integrates reinforcement learning (RL) with graph-based methods. A novel Dual Q–Adaptive Weighting model that balances reward and cost through a primal–dual learning mechanism is proposed. The framework learns energy-aware routing strategies from historical navigation experience. The model is compared against standard RL approaches—Q-Learning and Double Q-Learning—as well as enhanced variants of A* and Dijkstra’s algorithms that incorporate charging density and time-penalty considerations. Real-world EV charging infrastructure data from the Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC) and Placekey datasets are used to construct a clustered navigation graph via DBSCAN. Experimental results across multiple intercity routes show that the proposed Dual Q–Adaptive model achieves the highest route accuracy of 78.66%, outperforming Double Q-Learning (76.27%), Q-Learning (77.52%), and traditional A* (74.26%) and Dijkstra (60.92%) algorithms. A* and Dijkstra with modifications, use fewer charging stops than traditional algorithms. The Improvised algorithms provide substantial improvements over their baseline counterparts. The results demonstrate that reinforcement learning integrated with graph-theoretic optimization can enable scalable, infrastructure-aware, and efficient EV route planning.