Rebalancing Expanding EV Sharing Systems with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Electric Vehicle (EV) sharing systems have recently experienced unprecedented growth across the world. One of the key challenges in their operation is vehicle rebalancing, i.e., repositioning the EVs across stations to better satisfy future user demand. This is particularly challenging in the shared EV context, because i) the range of EVs is limited while charging time is substantial, which constrains the rebalancing options; and ii) as a new mobility trend, most of the current EV sharing systems are still continuously expanding their station networks, i.e., the targets for rebalancing can change over time. To tackle these challenges, in this paper we model the rebalancing task as a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problem, which directly takes the range and charging properties of the EVs into account. We propose a novel approach of policy optimization with action cascading, which isolates the non-stationarity locally, and use two connected networks to solve the formulated MARL. We evaluate the proposed approach using a simulator calibrated with 1-year operation data from a real EV sharing system. Results show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art, offering up to 14% gain in order satisfied rate and 12% increase in net revenue.