Along with the proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs), optimizing the use of EV charging space can significantly alleviate the growing load on intelligent transportation systems. As the foundation to achieve such an optimization, a spatiotemporal method for EV charging demand prediction in urban areas is required. Although several solutions have been proposed by using data-driven deep learning methods, it can be that these performance-oriented approaches may struggle to correctly understand the underlying factors influencing charging demand, particularly charging prices. A representative case that highlights the challenge faced by existing methods is their potential misinterpretation of high prices during peak times, leading to an incorrect assumption that higher prices correspond to increased demand. To address the challenges associated with training an accurate and reliable prediction model for EV charging demand, this paper proposes a novel approach called PAG, which leverages the integration of graph and temporal attention mechanisms for effective feature extraction and introduces physics-informed meta-learning in the pre-training step to facilitate prior knowledge learning. Evaluation results on a dataset of 18,061 EV charging piles in Shenzhen, China, show that the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art forecasting performance and the ability to understand the adaptive changes in charging demands caused by price fluctuations.

Recent booming successes of electric vehicles (EVs) motivate emerging exploration of spatio-temporal EV charging demand forecasting to inform policy making. Recent studies have contributed to remarkable accuracy improvement by developing deep learning methods. However, when they access massive amounts of data and frequently exchange data through the Internet of Things (IoT), data silos and inefficient training emerge as main challenges. To tackle these challenges, this study proposes an integrated approach for regional EV charging demand forecasting, named FMGCN, which consists of two modules, namely 1) Spatio-temporal Learning module, which introduces spatial and temporal attentions to capture the underlying charging patterns between different regions and cities effectively; and 2) Distributed Pretraining module, which incorporates Federated Learning and Meta-Learning to enhance the adaptivity and generalisability of the forecasting model. A comprehensive evaluation based on a real-world dataset of 25,246 public EV charging piles shows that the proposed model outperforms other representative models with 1) an average improvement of 29.9% in forecasting errors; 2) an acceleration of 65% in convergence speed; and 3) a sound adaptability to support varying charging demand.