Attention-based Citywide Electric Vehicle Charging Demand Prediction Approach Considering Urban Region and Dynamic Influences

Electric vehicle charging demand prediction is important for vacant charging pile recommendation and charging infrastructure planning, thus facilitating vehicle electrification and green energy development. The performance of previous spatio-temporal studies is still far from satisfactory because the traditional graphs are difficult to model non-pairwise spatial relationships and multivariate temporal features are not adequately taken into account. To tackle these issues, we propose an attention-based heterogeneous multivariate data fusion approach (AHMDF) for citywide electric vehicle charging demand prediction, which incorporates geo-based clustered hypergraph and multivariate gated Transformer to considers both static and dynamic influences. To learn non-pairwise relationships, we cluster service areas by the types and numbers of points of interest in the areas and develop attentive hypergraph networks accordingly. Graph attention mechanisms are used for information propagation between neighboring areas. Additionally, we improve the Transformer encoder utilizing gated mechanisms so that it can selectively learn dynamic auxiliary information and temporal features. Experiments on an electric vehicle charging benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared with a broad range of competing baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate the impact of dynamic influences on prediction results in different areas of the city and the effectiveness of our clustering method.