Forecasting Electric Vehicle Charging Demand in Smart Cities Using Hybrid Deep Learning of Regional Spatial Behaviours

This study presents a novel predictive framework for estimating electric vehicle (EV) charging demand in smart cities, contributing to the advancement of data-driven infrastructure planning through behavioural and spatial data analysis. Motivated by the accelerating regional demand accompanying EV adoption, this work introduces HCB-Net: a hybrid deep learning model that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for spatial feature extraction with Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) for robust regression. The framework is trained on user-level survey data from two demographically distinct UK regions, the West Midlands and the North East, incorporating user demographics, commute distance, charging frequency, and home/public charging preferences. HCB-Net achieved superior predictive performance, with a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.1490 and an R2 score of 0.3996. Compared to the best-performing traditional model (Linear Regression, R2=0.3520), HCB-Net improved predictive accuracy by 13.5% in terms of R2, and outperformed other deep learning models such as LSTM (R2=−0.3756) and GRU (R2=−0.6276), which failed to capture spatial patterns effectively. The hybrid model also reduced RMSE by approximately 23% compared to the standalone CNN (RMSE = 0.1666). While the moderate R2 indicates scope for further refinement, these results demonstrate that meaningful and interpretable demand forecasts can be generated from survey-based behavioural data, even in the absence of high-resolution temporal inputs. The model contributes a lightweight and scalable forecasting tool suitable for early-stage smart city planning in contexts where telemetry data are limited, thereby advancing the practical capabilities of EV infrastructure forecasting.