Hybrid System Identification of Electric Freight Transition Dynamics via SINDy and Neural ODEs

Abstract

The transition to electric heavy-duty freight is constrained by a strong interdependence between vehicle adoption and charging infrastructure deployment. While system dynamics models are well-suited to simulate these socio-technical feedback loops, their reliance on conditional logic and heuristic rules makes the underlying dynamics difficult to interpret mathematically. This limits the direct application of formal systems and control theory. This paper proposes a solution to that problem through a general hybrid system identification framework that extracts a continuous-time analytical surrogate from simulations of complex system dynamics. The approach combines the sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics algorithm with neural ordinary differential equations to form a grey-box model. The first component identifies the dominant interpretable dynamics under causal coupling constraints, while the neural residual captures unmodelled nonlinearities. The framework is trained using multiple shooting over a 40-year horizon. The resulting model reproduces the training trajectories with a normalized root-mean-square error below 4\%, while maintaining reliable predictive accuracy when evaluated on unseen initial conditions.