Electric vehicle routing problem with single or multiple recharges

Abstract

Abstract Nowadays, due to the new laws and policies related to the greenhouse gas emissions, and the rise of social and ecological awareness of transport sustainability, logistic companies started to incorporate green technologies in their distribution activities. Here, electric vehicles, as a cleaner mode of transport than conventional vehicles come to the fore and many companies are already integrating electric vehicles in their delivery fleets. Compared to the conventional vehicles, electric vehicles have a shorter driving range due to the limited battery capacity, and they need to recharge at charging stations more frequently. To efficiently manage the fleet of electric vehicles, new algorithms that take into account visits to charging stations have to be developed. In this paper, we observed the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (E-VRPTW) and multiple or single recharge policies during the route. The homogeneous fleet of battery electric vehicles with limited load and battery capacity, customer time windows and full linear recharge at charging stations are considered. The objective is to minimize total traveled distance while operating a minimal number of vehicles. To find the solution of the problem, on larger instances we applied the metaheuristic based on the ruin-recreate principle and on the small instances we solved the mixed integer program with commercial software.