The impact of synchronizing drivers breaks and recharging operations for electric vehicles

Electric commercial vehicles (ECVs) are gaining importance as they are seen to provide a sustainable mean of transportation. However, practitioners still see ECVs as less competitive compared with internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), especially in mid-haul operations where ECVs have to be recharged en route. In this paper we study the influence of hours of service (HOS) regulations on operational planning tasks of ECVs and ICEVs in mid-haul transportation. We introduce the electric vehicle routing problem with truck driver scheduling and present a mixed integer program as well as an adaptive large neighborhood search for the solution of large-size instances. We first compare the competitiveness of ECVs against ICEVs for the current state of the art in mid-haul transportation without considering HOS regulation, before we secondly analyze the impact of EU respective US HOS regulations on route patterns and costs of both vehicle types. We show, that HOS regulations affect the competitiveness of both ECVs and ICEVs and prove that synchronizing recharging and driver breaks helps to increase the competitiveness of ECVs. Cost savings of up to 20% can be achieved if ECVs are used instead of ICEVs.