Route planning for a fleet of electric vehicles with waiting times at charging stations

• Main Authors: LI, Baoxiang, JHA, Shashi Shekhar, LAU, Hoong Chuin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Constraint Programming; Electric Vehicle Routing Problem; Genetic algorithm; Mixed integer linear programming; Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering; Transportation
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4372; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5375/viewcontent/EVRP_EVO.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are the next wave of technology in the transportation industry. EVs are increasingly becoming common for personal transport and pushing the boundaries to become the mainstream mode of transportation. Use of such EVs in logistic fleets for delivering customer goods is not far from becoming reality. However, managing such fleet of EVs bring new challenges in terms of battery capacities and charging infrastructure for efficient route planning. Researchers have addressed such issues considering different aspects of the EVs such as linear battery charging/discharging rate, fixed travel times, etc. In this paper, we address the issue of waiting times due to limited charging capacity at the charging stations while planning the routes of EVs for providing pickup/delivery services. We provide an exact mathematical model of the problem considering waiting times of vehicle based on their arrival at the charging stations. We further develop a genetic algorithm approach that embeds Constraint Programming to solve the problem. We test our approach on a set of benchmark Solomon instances.