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

Nour-Eddine Moumni, Rachid Alaoui, Driss Kiouach

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…