A Behavior-Guided Online Probabilistic Forecasting Method for Electric vehicle Charging Loads
Organizations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China · Intelligent Transportation Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511458, China
Abstract
Electric vehicle (EV) charging loads exhibit strong behavioral heterogeneity and temporal variability, posing significant challenges for online probabilistic forecasting under evolving operating conditions. In particular, persistent charging patterns may differ substantially across stations, while recent behavioral changes can continuously alter the underlying load distributions. This paper proposes a behavior-guided online probabilistic forecasting framework that explicitly characterizes persistent station-specific patterns and recent behavioral changes. A dual-timescale behavior representation is constructed to distinguish long-term charging characteristics from recent behavioral states and quantify their deviations. These behavioral changes are further semantically encoded to guide drift-aware forecasting adaptation, while a delayed-feedback mechanism ensures temporally consistent online updates when observations become available across different forecasting horizons. Experiments on ten heterogeneous real-world charging stations demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms conventional forecasting models and concept-drift-aware online baselines in forecasting accuracy and probabilistic reliability. For 1-h-ahead forecasting, the proposed method reduces MSE and Pinball loss by 15.3% and 17.8%, respectively, over the corresponding best baselines. For 4-h-ahead forecasting, the improvements further reach 16.8% and 22.6%, respectively, demonstrating consistent performance gains under evolving charging behaviors and extended forecasting horizons.
Figures & tables
| Model | Params. | Inference | Update | P95 | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (M) | (ms/sample) | (ms/step) | (ms) | (MB) | |
| TCN | 0.06 | 0.61 | 3.48 | 4.58 | 18.2 |
| PatchTST | 0.60 | 2.15 | 9.24 | 14.79 | 11.4 |
| LSTM | 0.05 | 0.21 | 2.97 | 4.21 | 1.8 |
| FSNet | 0.07 | 0.84 | 4.51 | 6.70 | 2.1 |
| OneNet | 0.13 | 1.42 | 6.99 | 11.30 | 3.0 |
| Encoder | Behavior | 1 h ahead | 4 h ahead | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MSE | Pinball | PICP@90 | MSE | Pinball | PICP@90 | ||
| LSTM | Without | 0.674 | 0.164 | 0.751 | 0.896 | 0.225 | 0.743 |
| LSTM | With | 0.360 | 0.097 | 0.898 | 0.412 | 0.106 | 0.897 |
| TCN | Without | 0.653 | 0.173 | 0.751 | 0.984 | 0.239 | 0.703 |
| TCN | With | 0.378 | 0.103 | 0.891 | 0.446 | 0.116 | 0.886 |
| PatchTST | Without | 0.678 | 0.179 | 0.812 | 0.923 | 0.212 | 0.768 |
| Name | Setting |
|---|---|
| Offline pretraining | |
| Initial training period | 60 days |
| Pretraining epochs | 30 |
| Batch size | 128 |
| Optimizer | AdamW |
| Initial learning rate | |
Probabilistic Forecasting
Probabilistic forecasting predicts distributions or events with quantified uncertainty to support reliable decisions under uncertainty.
See all 230 papers