Towards Smart Urban Freight Distribution Using Fleets of Modular Electric Vehicles

This work deals with the electric Modular Fleet Size and Mix Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, which is an extension of the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW), where the fleet consists of electric modular vehicles (EMVs). An interesting feature of this work is that despite the fact that the vehicles have a limited range, they are allowed sometimes to recharge at certain customer locations in order to continue a tour. To tackle this problem, a comprehensive mathematical formulation is given in order to model the problem and the multiple constraints appeared due to the modularity, electric charging, time windows and capacity issues. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, a memetic algorithm is designed for determining good quality solutions in reasonable computational times. Extensive computational experiments carried out on some benchmark instances show the effectiveness of both the problem formulation and the memetic algorithm.