Adversarial examples are firstly investigated in the area of computer vision:
by adding some carefully designed ''noise'' to the original input image, the
perturbed image that cannot be distinguished from the original one by human,
can fool a well-trained classifier easily. In recent years, researchers also
demonstrated that adversarial examples can mislead deep reinforcement learning
(DRL) agents on playing video games using image inputs with similar methods.
However, although DRL has been more and more popular in the area of intelligent
transportation systems, there is little research investigating the impacts of
adversarial attacks on them, especially for algorithms that do not take images
as inputs. In this work, we investigated several fast methods to generate
adversarial examples to significantly degrade the performance of a well-trained
DRL- based energy management system of an extended range electric delivery
vehicle. The perturbed inputs are low-dimensional state representations and
close to the original inputs quantified by different kinds of norms. Our work
shows that, to apply DRL agents on real-world transportation systems,
adversarial examples in the form of cyber-attack should be considered
carefully, especially for applications that may lead to serious safety issues.