Spatial-temporal load forecasting of electric vehicle charging stations based on graph neural network

Accurate forecasting of the load of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations is critical for EV users to choose the optimal charging stations and ensure the safe and efficient operation of the power grid. The charging load of different charging stations in the same area is interrelated. However, forecasting the charging load of individual charging station using traditional time series methods is insufficient. To fully consider the spatial-temporal correlation between charging stations, this paper proposes a new charging load forecasting framework based on the Adaptive Spatial-temporal Graph Neural Network with Transformer (ASTNet-T). First, an adaptive graph is constructed based on the spatial relationship and historical information between charging stations, and the local spatial-temporal dependencies hidden therein are captured by the spatio-temporal convolutional network. Then, a Transformer network is introduced to capture the global spatial-temporal dependencies of charging loads and predict the future multilevel charging loads of charging stations. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world charging load datasets. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm are verified by experiments. In the Dundee City dataset, the MAE, MAPE, and RMSE values of the proposed model are improved by approximately 71%, 90%, and 67%, respectively, compared to the suboptimal baseline model, demonstrating that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the accuracy of load forecasting.