arXiv subjects

Rachid Alaoui

Publications and source records attributed to Rachid Alaoui.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Real-Time Electric Vehicle Charging Management in IoEV-Enabled Smart Cities

The rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) in urban environments demands intelligent, decentralised charging management strategies that operate under strict real-time constraints. This paper proposes an Edge-Intelligent architecture in which each EV selects a charging station (CS) by querying a shared, centrally trained Deep Q-Network (DQN) policy over a lightweight MQTT publish-subscribe backbone; independent per-EV edge inference is the deployment target, not the configuration evaluated here. The reported simulation evaluates that shared DQN policy applied sequentially to each vehicle's observations within a single SUMO run, using MQTT for KPI telemetry while observations are obtained through TraCI. The system is evaluated on two real-world road networks from OpenStreetMap (Rabat Agdal-Hay Riad and Tangier, Morocco); the primary network carries four geolocated public charging stations with heterogeneous power levels (50 kW and 150 kW). Three traffic demand profiles (morning, midday, evening peak) are simulated, and four decision policies are compared: an Adaptive Heuristic, a Tabular Q-Learning agent, the proposed DQN agent, and a Double DQN variant. A multi-seed statistical protocol (7 seeds, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, Cohen's d) evaluates the results. The DQN agent achieves a 6.8% relative improvement in charge rate and a 5.4% increase in delivered energy over the Adaptive Heuristic under Evening Peak demand ($p = 0.016$, Cohen's $d = 0.99$ and $1.51$), while showing no advantage in waiting time; on the second network the heuristic leads on waiting time, so the ranking is not stable across geographies. A scalability analysis shows linear state-space growth with station count and sub-millisecond inference; all runs include intermittent station outages under a Markov failure process.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Silent Reward and Environment Defects in EV Charging Simulation Benchmarks: A Diagnostic Checklist

Reinforcement-learning (RL) benchmarks built on microscopic traffic simulators such as SUMO are increasingly used to compare agent architectures for electric vehicle (EV) charging assignment. Unlike crashes, defects in the reward function, the environment's stochastic model, or the state encoding often fail silently: the simulation completes, produces plausible numbers, and the comparison is biased. We report five such defects, found by auditing a five-agent benchmark on OpenStreetMap road networks, stated generically: a shared random generator that desynchronises seed-paired comparisons, an ablation-specific reward clip applied unconditionally, a normalisation mismatch that zeroes a reward term, a per-timestep penalty that should fire once per event, and a state dimensionality documented but never wired into the network. We quantify three: a rejection counter inflated up to 125x across agents/cities, a reward term bounded at about $10^{-4}$ of its intended scale, and a 16.6%/16.3% greedy-action divergence from a state-encoding mismatch. Re-analysing a historical ablation, no A1-A2 effect survives family-wise correction; a 56-run campaign confirms the RNG defect's mechanism directly while showing its correction does not change that conclusion. We provide an eight-item checklist as a low-cost first-pass audit; in a later regeneration, three checks caught two new defects while three further process/artefact defects fell outside its boundary.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Cooperative EV Charging Assignment Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: A Comparison of QMIX and Independent Q-Learning Under Urban Traffic Uncertainty

The allocation of electric vehicles to public charging stations is increasingly constrained by the fact that several heterogeneous facilities often serve the same stream of requests while observing only partial local information. An accept/reject decision that is defensible for one station may nevertheless reduce the efficiency of the charging district as a whole. We formulate this operational problem as a Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP) and examine whether Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE), instantiated through QMIX, improves assignment performance relative to a cooperative Independent Q-Learning baseline (IQL). The evaluation uses a six-station urban network simulated with SUMO, five independent random seeds, 200 training episodes, and four traffic flux scenarios ranging from 100 to 250 vehicles/hour. Under this protocol, QMIX reaches a mean reward per evaluated decision of +0.776, versus +0.578 for IQL (delta = +0.198, seed-paired Cohens dz = 2.98, exact two-sided Wilcoxon p = 0.0625, the minimum attainable value at this sample size), and raises the acceptance rate from 72.4% to 94.0% (delta = +21.6 pp, dz = 5.24, Wilcoxon p = 0.0625). A five-variant ablation suggests this gain is primarily attributable to the CTDE architecture when holding cooperative reward terms fixed, though not formally isolated with a single seed. By contrast, cooperative reward shaping and experience sharing show no clear descriptive benefit and may slightly reduce performance. These findings support the view that, for multi-station charging assignment, coordination should be embedded in the learning architecture rather than added only through heuristic cooperation terms.

cs.MA↗