Abstract
The increasing use of electric vehicles in road and air transportation, especially in last-mile delivery and city mobility, raises new operational challenges due to the limited capacity of electric batteries. These limitations impose additional driving range constraints when optimizing the distribution and mobility plans. During the last years, several researchers from the Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research communities have been developing optimization, simulation, and machine learning approaches that aim at generating efficient and sustainable routing plans for hybrid fleets, including both electric and internal combustion engine vehicles. After contextualizing the relevance of electric vehicles in promoting sustainable transportation practices, this paper reviews the existing work in the field of electric vehicle routing problems. In particular, we focus on articles related to the well-known vehicle routing, arc routing, and team orienteering problems. The review is followed by numerical examples that illustrate the gains that can be obtained by employing optimization methods in the aforementioned field. Finally, several research opportunities are highlighted.
Highlights
With the goal of promoting sustainability, many cities in the world are observing an increasing use of electric vehicles (EVs), both for citizens’ mobility [1] and for last-mile logistics [2]
We review the existing works on electric vehicle routing problems (VRPs), electric arc routing problems (ARPs), and electric team orienteering problems (TOPs), and how different authors have been using alternative approaches to deal with these richer environments
Our review shows that the number of scientific publications on electric arc routing problem (E-ARP) and electric team orienteering problem (E-TOP) is much lower than the one corresponding to electric VRPs (E-VRPs), which means that there are many open research lines in the former problems
Summary
With the goal of promoting sustainability, many cities in the world are observing an increasing use of electric vehicles (EVs), both for citizens’ mobility [1] and for last-mile logistics [2]. The main contributions of the paper can be summarized as follows: (i) we provide a literature review on different types of electric vehicle routing problems (VRPs, ARPs, and TOPs), highlighting the characteristics of each problem as well as the solution method employed; (ii) we discuss how the sustainable transportation concept relates to Energies 2021, 14, 5131 the increasing use of electric vehicles; (iii) we analyze how the introduction of driving range constraints, associated with the employment of electric batteries, has been taken into account during the development of vehicle routing algorithms; (iv) we highlight the relevance of these range-aware algorithms to avoid increasing the cost of routing plans more than is strictly necessary; and (v) we provide a novel numerical experiment as well as a comparative data analysis of results obtained by different researchers when optimizing routing problems with EVs. Figure 2 shows the evolution of scientific articles published in Scopus-indexed journals during the last decade.
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