Evolving LLM-Derived Control Policies for Residential EV Charging and Vehicle-to-Grid Energy Optimization
About
This research presents a novel application of Evolutionary Computation to the domain of residential electric vehicle (EV) energy management. While reinforcement learning (RL) achieves high performance in vehicle-to-grid (V2G) optimization, it typically produces opaque "black-box" neural networks that are difficult for consumers and regulators to audit. Addressing this interpretability gap, we propose a program search framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as intelligent mutation operators within an iterative prompt-evaluation-repair loop. Utilizing the high-fidelity EV2Gym simulation environment as a fitness function, the system undergoes successive refinement cycles to synthesize executable Python policies that balance profit maximization, user comfort, and physical safety constraints. We benchmark four prompting strategies: Imitation, Reasoning, Hybrid and Runtime, evaluating their ability to discover adaptive control logic. Results demonstrate that the Hybrid strategy produces concise, human-readable heuristics that achieve 118% of the baseline profit, effectively discovering complex behaviors like anticipatory arbitrage and hysteresis without explicit programming. This work establishes LLM-driven Evolutionary Computation as a practical approach for generating EV charging control policies that are transparent, inspectable, and suitable for real residential deployment.