Improved prediction of total energy consumption and feature analysis in electric vehicles using machine learning and shapley additive explanations method

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) have emerged as the green energy alternative for conventional vehicles. While various governments promote EVs, people feel “range anxiety” because of their limited driving range or charge capacity. A limited number of charging stations are available, which results in a strong demand for predicting energy consumed by EVs. In this paper, machine learning (ML) models such as multiple linear regression (MLR), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and support vector regression (SVR) were used to investigate the total energy consumption (TEC) by the EVs. The independent variables used for the study include changing real-life situations or external parameters, such as trip distance, tire type, driving style, power, odometer reading, EV model, city, motorway, country roads, air conditioning, and park heating. We compared the ML models’ performance along with the error analysis. A pairwise correlation study showed that trip distance has a high correlation coefficient (0.87) with TEC. XGBoost had better prediction accuracy (~92%) or R2 (0.92). Trip distance, power, heating, and odometer reading were the most important features influencing the TEC, identified using the shapley additive explanations method.