The transport sector significantly contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions, making electromobility crucial in the race toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In recent years, the increasing competition among manufacturers, the development of cheaper batteries, the ongoing policy support, and people’s greater environmental awareness have consistently increased electric vehicles (EVs) adoption. Nevertheless, EVs charging needs—highly influenced by EV drivers’ behavior uncertainty—challenge their integration into the power grid on a massive scale, leading to potential issues, such as overloading and grid instability. Smart charging strategies can mitigate these adverse effects by using information and communication technologies to optimize EV charging schedules in terms of power systems’ constraints, electricity prices, and users’ preferences, benefiting stakeholders by minimizing network losses, maximizing aggregators’ profit, and reducing users’ driving range anxiety. To this end, accurately forecasting EV charging demand is paramount. Traditionally used forecasting methods, such as model-driven and statistical ones, often rely on complex mathematical models, simulated data, or simplifying assumptions, failing to accurately represent current real-world EV charging profiles. Machine learning (ML) methods, which leverage real-life historical data to model complex, nonlinear, high-dimensional problems, have demonstrated superiority in this domain, becoming a hot research topic. In a scenario where EV technologies, charging infrastructure, data acquisition, and ML techniques constantly evolve, this paper conducts a systematized literature review (SLR) to understand the current landscape of ML-based EV charging demand forecasting, its emerging trends, and its future perspectives. The proposed SLR provides a well-structured synthesis of a large body of literature, categorizing approaches not only based on their ML-based approach, but also on the EV charging application. In addition, we focus on the most recent technological advances, exploring deep-learning architectures, spatial-temporal challenges, and cross-domain learning strategies. This offers an integrative perspective. On the one hand, it maps the state of the art, identifying a notable shift toward deep-learning approaches and an increasing interest in public EV charging stations. On the other hand, it uncovers underexplored methodological intersections that can be further exploited and research gaps that remain underaddressed, such as real-time data integration, long-term forecasting, and the development of adaptable models to different charging behaviors and locations. In this line, emerging trends combining recurrent and convolutional neural networks, and using relatively new ML techniques, especially transformers, and ML paradigms, such as transfer-, federated-, and meta-learning, have shown promising results for addressing spatial-temporality, time-scalability, and geographical-generalizability issues, paving the path for future research directions.
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