Sharing economy to improve routing for urban logistics distribution using electric vehicles

Abstract

With the increasing concern on global warming, companies begin to use electric vehicles for urban distribution. Owing to battery capacity limitations, electric vehicles may need recharging during delivery process. Hence, the traditional vehicle routing methodologies, which were designed for fossil fuel-powered vehicles, are not feasible for electric vehicles. For this reason, this paper studies the urban logistics distribution routing problem of electric vehicles in the context of sharing economy with the consideration of carbon taxes (taxes on CO2 emissions) and time-of-use electricity prices (time-varying electricity prices), and proposes an optimization model of the electric vehicle routing problem in view of sharing economy. The proposed optimization model aims to minimize the total cost, which includes the operation, penalty, queuing (waiting at the charging stations), electricity and environment costs. An ant colony algorithm is developed for optimization purposes in the model. In this study, simulations are conducted based on a case study with actual locations. The first simulated scenario indicates that adopting distribution sharing is able to reduce travelling distances as well as the total cost in comparison to having separate distribution systems. The second simulated scenario is conducted under different time electricity prices; the results show that lower time-of-use electricity prices alleviate traffic congestion and reduce the total cost. In the third simulated scenario, the effects of different carbon taxes are analysed. The results show that the CO2 emissions will decrease when the carbon tax rate is increased. Finally, the limitations and future research directions of this paper are also discussed.