Integrated operational planning model, considering optimal delivery routing, incentives and electric vehicle aggregated demand management

The use of electric vehicles is being promoted to address emerging concerns about global warming associated with emissions from fossil fuels. Besides, in the context of parcel delivery deep growth related to e-commerce, electric vehicle is becoming an alternative to conventional fossil fuel technology. Intrinsically, the charging process implies the interdependence between the transportation and electric power systems. This paper presents a new multistage optimization-based approach that allows linking delivery routing and aggregated demand management in the transportation and electric power systems, respectively. For the routing and charging of each independent electric vehicle, battery degradation, acceleration-and speed-dependent power consumption, penalty for delivery delay, tolls, fixed charging prices and incentives for availability time are considered. An electric vehicle demand aggregator is used to guarantee the synergy between systems. Incentives are included to motivate electric vehicles to remain at charging intersections. However, attractive incentives can create electric power system congestion due to simultaneous charges on nodes. Thus, an iterative decongestion methodology is developed. The resulting model is divided into three stages: delivery allocation, delivery routing for each independent electric vehicle and optimal energy management by electric vehicle demand aggregator. The resulting optimization problem is cast as a mixed-integer linear programming model for the first two stages and a linear programming model for the third stage. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on a real 284-intersection map with a set of 100 electric vehicles, showing that incentives allow electric vehicle demand aggregator to achieve cost savings of 8.5%.

Automated summary

This study introduces a new multistage optimization method that combines delivery routing and demand management with electric vehicle charging to address the interdependence between electric vehicles and the power system. Various factors are considered in the routing and charging process, including battery degradation, energy consumption, penalties, tolls, and more. The research shows that cost savings for the electric vehicle demand aggregator can be achieved through the optimized model.