The consistent electric-Vehicle routing problem with backhauls and charging management

We consider a consistent vehicle routing problem for the delivery of parcels with electric vehicles. Stemming from a real-world problem, we assume that vehicles can only be charged with electricity between their delivery tours in the morning and their pickup tours in the afternoon. For this purpose, a charging station with a limited amount of charging slots is available at the depot. We aim at generating a set of vehicle routes that are driver- and time-consistent and efficiently use limited charging resources, while optimizing the sum of vehicle fixed cost, vehicle/driver operating time, arrival time consistency and driver consistency. We present a mathematical model to describe the problem in detail. For solving the real-world problem, a template-based Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search is developed, complemented with constraint programming for charging management and quadratic programming for delivery and pickup trip scheduling. Computational experiments for different settings and scenarios, based on data from an Austrian parcel delivery company, are presented and analysed. (C) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

This paper addresses a consistent vehicle routing problem for the delivery of parcels using electric vehicles. The problem considers the constraint that vehicles can only be charged between delivery and pickup tours, and aims to generate efficient vehicle routes while optimizing multiple objectives.