Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with an Enhanced Vehicle Dispatching Approach Considering Real-Life Data

Abstract

Although the EVRP (Electric Vehicle routing problem) has promising results on the environmental scale, its implementation has proved challenging. The difficulty of the EVRP resides in the limited driving range of the electric vehicles, combined with the significant charging time. While the charging cost is less than the cost of fuel, this charge time adds to the overall travel time and may overlap with customers’ time windows. All these factors increased the computational time exponentially and resulted in the need to overlook some constraints such as traffic congestion, road conditions, weather impact on energy consumption, and driving style, to name a few, in order to speed up execution time. While this method proved effective in accelerating the process of the EVRP, it did, however, render the approach unrealistic, as it steered far from real-life settings and made the approach unpredictable when facing dynamic and changing parameters. In this paper, we try to remedy this issue by proposing an approach in which we try to replicate real-life parameters such as heterogenous fleets, energy consumption, and infrastructure data. The objective of our approach was to minimize the total travel time, travel distance, energy consumed, and the number of vehicles deployed. To solve this problem, we propose a three-stages approach, in which the first stage consists of a newly developed dispatching approach where customers are assigned to vehicles. The second stage uses the genetic algorithm to find a set of optimal paths, and, finally, in the third stage, charging stations are inserted in the selected paths. Upon testing our approach on Solomon’s instances, our approach proved effective in finding optimal solutions in a reasonable time for five- to fifteen-customer datasets. However, when trying to solve larger datasets, the approach was slowed down by the extreme number of constraints it had to satisfy.