Predicting Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Occupancy: A Federated Deep Learning Framework

Electric vehicles (EVs) have long been recognized as a solution to the shortage of fossil fuels and the environmental problems associated with increasing CO2 emissions. However, charging an electric vehicle can take significant time at certain charging stations. Additionally, the limited deployment of charging stations is a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of electric mobility (e-mobility). In fact, many drivers struggle to locate a convenient charging station before their vehicle’s battery runs out. This study introduces a novel approach to addressing the issue of congestion at public charging stations and reducing the amount of time drivers spend waiting in line by predicting their occupancy. Previous research has relied on traditional Deep Learning (DL) techniques for prediction, which require centralized data collection. Nevertheless, each Charging Station Operator (CSO) holds sensitive data about its charging stations and users that cannot be shared with external parties. To address these privacy concerns, we propose a Federated Deep Learning approach where each CSO trains a DL model locally and then sends the model updates (or parameters) to a server for aggregation. Experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate that predicting occupancy using the Federated Deep Learning approach achieves promising results (86,21% of accuracy and 91,49% of f1-score ), guarantees privacy, minimizes data transfer costs over the network, and allows individual CSOs to benefit from the rich datasets of others without sharing their sensitive data.