Routing a mix of conventional, plug-in hybrid, and electric vehicles

Abstract

We introduce an electric vehicle routing problem combining conventional, plug-in hybrid, and electric vehicles. Electric vehicles are constrained in their service range by their battery capacity, and may require time-consuming recharging operations at some specific locations. Plug-in hybrid vehicles have two engines, an internal combustion engine and an electric engine using a built-in rechargeable battery. These vehicles can avoid visits to recharging stations by switching to fossil fuel. However, this flexibility comes at the price of a generally higher consumption rate and utility cost.To solve this complex problem variant, we design a sophisticated metaheuristic which combines a genetic algorithm with local and large neighborhood search. All route evaluations, within the approach, are based on a layered optimization algorithm which combines labeling techniques and greedy evaluation policies to insert recharging stations visits in a fixed trip and select the fuel types. The metaheuristic is finally hybridized with an integer programming solver, over a set partitioning formulation, so as to recombine high-quality routes from the search history into better solutions. Extensive experimental analyses are conducted, highlighting the good performance of the algorithm and the contribution of each of its main components. Finally, we investigate the impact of fuel and energy cost on fleet composition decisions. Our experiments show that a careful use of a mixed fleet can significantly reduce operational costs in a large variety of price scenarios, in comparison with the use of a fleet composed of a single vehicle class.