A hybrid algorithm for electric vehicle routing problem with nonlinear charging

Abstract

This paper investigates the electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and nonlinear charging constraints (EVRPTW-NL), which is more practical due to battery degradation. A hybrid algorithm combining an improved differential evolution and several heuristic (IDE) is proposed to solve this problem, where the weighted sum of the total trip time and customer satisfaction value is minimized. In the proposed algorithm, a special encoding method is presented that considers charging stations features. Then, a battery charging adjustment (BCA) strategy is integrated to decrease the charging time. Furthermore, a novel negative repair strategy is embedded to make the solution feasible. Finally, several instances are generated to examine the effectiveness of the IDE algorithm. The high performance of the IDE algorithm is shown in comparison with two efficient algorithms.