An Artificial Physarum polycephalum Colony for the Electric Location-Routing Problem

Abstract

Electric vehicles invented for environmental sustainability are prone to adverse impacts on environmental sustainability due to the location and construction of their charging facilities. In this article, an artificial Physarum polycephalum colony is proposed to solve the novel challenging problem. First, the electric location-routing problem is established as a multi-objective network panning model with electric constraints to provide the optimal charging infrastructure layout, electric vehicle maintenance costs, and traffic conditions. The electric facility location problem and vehicle routing problem are integrated by integer programming, which considers the total distance, total time, total cost, total number of electric vehicles, and order fill rate. Second, an artificial Physarum polycephalum colony is introduced to solve the complex electric location-routing problem and includes the two basic operations of expansion and contraction. In the expansion operation, the optimal parent individuals will generate more offspring individuals, so as to expand the population size. In the contraction operation, only individuals with high fitness will be selected to survive through a merge sorting algorithm, resulting in a decrease in population size to the initial value. Through the iterative computing of the two main operations, the proposed artificial Physarum polycephalum colony can finally find the optimal solution to the objective function. Third, a benchmark test is designed for the electric location-routing problem by extracting the real road network from Tokyo, and the experimental results prove the effectiveness and applicability of this work.