The electric vehicle routing problem: outlook and recharging strategies

The utilization of battery electric vehicle (BEV) fleets in urban logistics has a growing practical relevance. Within this context, the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (EVRP) has been introduced as an extension to the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) where the fleet consists of BEVs instead of the internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). The main difference between EVRP and VRP is that BEVs have shorter driving range because of their limited battery capacities and may need to be recharged at a charging station in order to continue servicing customers. The recharging may take place at any battery level. In this study, we provide an overview of the problem, present the mathematical programming formulations for different recharging strategies, and provide solutions for some benchmark instances from the literature. We attempt to solve the small size problems optimally using IBM ILOG CPLEX. For the large instances, we implement an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) algorithm.