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1. Coupling User Preference with External Rewards to Enable Driver-centered and Resource-aware EV Charging Recommendation

   Li, C. ; Dong, Z. ; Fisher, N. ; Zhu, D. ( March 2023 , Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2022)

   Electric Vehicle (EV) charging recommendation that both accommodates user preference and adapts to the ever-changing external environment arises as a cost-effective strategy to alleviate the range anxiety of private EV drivers. Previous studies focus on centralized strategies to achieve optimized resource allocation, particularly useful for privacy-indifferent taxi fleets and fixed-route public transits. However, private EV driver seeks a more personalized and resource-aware charging recommendation that is tailor-made to accommodate the user preference (when and where to charge) yet sufficiently adaptive to the spatiotemporal mismatch between charging supply and demand. Here we propose a novel Regularized Actor-Critic (RAC) charging recommendation approach that would allow each EV driver to strike an optimal balance between the user preference (historical charging pattern) and the external reward (driving distance and wait time). Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the unique features and superior performance of our approach to the competing methods. 

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2. Coupling User Preference with External Rewards to Enable Driver-centered and Resource-aware EV Charging Recommendation

   Li, Chengyin ; Dong, Zheng ; Fisher, Nathan ; Zhu, Dongxiao ( March 2023 , Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases)

   Amini, MR ; Canu, S. ; Fischer, A. ; Guns, T. ; Kralj Novak, P. ; Tsoumakas, G. (Ed.)

   Electric Vehicle (EV) charging recommendation that both accommodates user preference and adapts to the ever-changing external environment arises as a cost-effective strategy to alleviate the range anxiety of private EV drivers. Previous studies focus on centralized strategies to achieve optimized resource allocation, particularly useful for privacy-indifferent taxi fleets and fixed-route public transits. However, private EV driver seeks a more personalized and resource-aware charging recommendation that is tailor-made to accommodate the user preference (when and where to charge) yet sufficiently adaptive to the spatiotemporal mismatch between charging supply and demand. Here we propose a novel Regularized Actor-Critic (RAC) charging recommendation approach that would allow each EV driver to strike an optimal balance between the user preference (historical charging pattern) and the external reward (driving distance and wait time). Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the unique features and superior performance of our approach to the competing methods. 

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3. Evaluation of Mixed Electric Fleet for Ride-Hailing Services under California's Clean Miles Standard: A Case Study in San Francisco

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FISTS60717.2024.10485541  

   Liu, Haishan ; Hao, Peng ; Barth, Matthew ( February 2024 , IEEE)

   Electrifying the ride-hailing services has the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the shared mobility sector. However, these emission reduction benefits depend on the utilization of EVs to serve trip requests, especially during the fleet electrification process. In this paper, we evaluated the performance and emission impacts of ride-hailing service with three dispatching policies and various EV penetration levels in the ride-hailing fleet. A large-scale simulation platform was developed for the city of San Francisco in SUMO to enable the application of ride-hailing, electric vehicle charging, and idle vehicle repositioning. Simulation results indicate that with a 60% EVs in the simulated fleet, the off-peak EV priority policy and off-peak EV only policy can reduce CO2 emissions by 32% - 40% while preserving the mobility performance in terms of deadheading, total travel distance, and average rider pick-up time. It is important for ride-hailing platforms to increase the zero-emission rides and encourage ride pooling to comply with California’s Clean Miles Standard. 

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4. Hierarchical planning for resource allocation in emergency response systems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3450267.3450543  

   Pettet, Geoffrey ; Mukhopadhyay, Ayan ; Kochenderfer, Mykel J. ; Dubey, Abhishek ( January 2021 , 12th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems,)

   null (Ed.)

   A classical problem in city-scale cyber-physical systems (CPS) is resource allocation under uncertainty. Spatial-temporal allocation of resources is optimized to allocate electric scooters across urban areas, place charging stations for vehicles, and design efficient on-demand transit. Typically, such problems are modeled as Markov (or semi-Markov) decision processes. While online, offline, and decentralized methodologies have been used to tackle such problems, none of the approaches scale well for large-scale decision problems. We create a general approach to hierarchical planning that leverages structure in city-level CPS problems to tackle resource allocation under uncertainty. We use emergency response as a case study and show how a large resource allocation problem can be split into smaller problems. We then create a principled framework for solving the smaller problems and tackling the interaction between them. Finally, we use real-world data from a major metropolitan area in the United States to validate our approach. Our experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches used in the field of emergency response. 

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5. Pricing-aware Real-time Charging Scheduling and Charging Station Expansion for Large-scale Electric Buses

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3428080  

   Wang, Guang ; Fang, Zhihan ; Xie, Xiaoyang ; Wang, Shuai ; Sun, Huijun ; Zhang, Fan ; Liu, Yunhuai ; Zhang, Desheng ( February 2021 , ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology)

   We are witnessing a rapid growth of electrified vehicles due to the ever-increasing concerns on urban air quality and energy security. Compared to other types of electric vehicles, electric buses have not yet been prevailingly adopted worldwide due to their high owning and operating costs, long charging time, and the uneven spatial distribution of charging facilities. Moreover, the highly dynamic environment factors such as unpredictable traffic congestion, different passenger demands, and even the changing weather can significantly affect electric bus charging efficiency and potentially hinder the further promotion of large-scale electric bus fleets. To address these issues, in this article, we first analyze a real-world dataset including massive data from 16,359 electric buses, 1,400 bus lines, and 5,562 bus stops. Then, we investigate the electric bus network to understand its operating and charging patterns, and further verify the necessity and feasibility of a real-time charging scheduling. With such understanding, we design busCharging , a pricing-aware real-time charging scheduling system based on Markov Decision Process to reduce the overall charging and operating costs for city-scale electric bus fleets, taking the time-variant electricity pricing into account. To show the effectiveness of busCharging , we implement it with the real-world data from Shenzhen, which includes GPS data of electric buses, the metadata of all bus lines and bus stops, combined with data of 376 charging stations for electric buses. The evaluation results show that busCharging dramatically reduces the charging cost by 23.7% and 12.8% of electricity usage simultaneously. Finally, we design a scheduling-based charging station expansion strategy to verify our busCharging is also effective during the charging station expansion process. 

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