In order to ensure high-quality and on-time delivery in logistic distribution processes, it is necessary to efficiently manage the delivery fleet. Nowadays, due to the new policies and regulations related to greenhouse gas emission in the transport sector, logistic companies are paying higher penalties for each emission gram of CO2/km. With electric vehicle market penetration, many companies are evaluating the integration of electric vehicles in their fleet, as they do not have local greenhouse gas emissions, produce minimal noise, and are independent of the fluctuating oil price. The well-researched vehicle routing problem (VRP) is extended to the electric vehicle routing problem (E-VRP), which takes into account specific characteristics of electric vehicles. In this paper, a literature review on recent developments regarding the E-VRP is presented. The challenges that emerged with the integration of electric vehicles in the delivery processes are described, together with electric vehicle characteristics and recent energy consumption models. Several variants of the E-VRP and related problems are observed. To cope with the new routing challenges in E-VRP, efficient VRP heuristics and metaheuristics had to be adapted. An overview of the state-of-the-art procedures for solving the E-VRP and related problems is presented.
With the rise of the electric vehicle market share, many logistic companies have started to use electric vehicles for goods delivery. Compared to the vehicles with an internal combustion engine, electric vehicles are considered as a cleaner mode of transport that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As electric vehicles have a shorter driving range and have to visit charging stations to replenish their energy, the efficient routing plan is harder to achieve. In this paper, the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (EVRPTW), which deals with the routing of electric vehicles for the purpose of goods delivery, is observed. Two recharge policies are considered: full recharge and partial recharge. To solve the problem, an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) metaheuristic based on the ruin-recreate strategy is coupled with a new initial solution heuristic, local search, route removal, and exact procedure for optimal charging station placement. The procedure for the O(1) evaluation in EVRPTW with partial and full recharge strategies is presented. The ALNS was able to find 38 new best solutions on benchmark EVRPTW instances. The results also indicate the benefits and drawbacks of using a partial recharge strategy compared to the full recharge strategy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.