Simultaneous Optimization Of Charging Infrastructure Strategy And Routing Problem Of Electric Vehicles

The environmental and financial consequences of mankind dependence on fossil fuel have become a major issue.In recent years,people have made efforts to deal with the situation in several fields.In logistics industry,the electric vehicle is considered as a crucial alternative to the conventional internal combustion vehicle.However,the limited driving range of the electric vehicle has hindered its application in logistics operation.In addition,due to insufficiency of public charging stations,the company-owned business model of charging stations is considered to be a serious altermative for logistics enterprises,which leads to the need of the company to plan charging stations.Due to the interdependency among type selection of charging infrastructure,location of the charging station,and the vehicle routing plan,these three decisions should be determined simultaneously to achieve the optimal status of the system.However,there're limited literature on this topic.Based on the background,we studied the simultaneous optimization of charging station infrastructure strategy and routing problem of electric vehicles,which incorporates the charging station strategy,the type selection and location decisions,with vehicle routing problem,and takes into account the customer time windows,and the loading capacity and battery capacity of the electric vehicle.After studying the existing literature about electric vehicles,and location-routing problem,we formulated the problem as a mixed integer linear program.Due to the complexity of the problem,the exact algorithm may have difficulties in solving a realistic-scale instance.Thus,we developed a hybrid metaheuristic,which incorporates adaptive variable neighborhood search(AVNS)and tabu search(TS).The performance of the algorithm was evaluated with a set of instances that can be solved by the optimization software CPLEX.Moreover,two cases based on intra-city and inter-city transportation were applied to verify the application of the research and the effectiveness of the algorithm.The computing results demonstrate that the algorithm can solve the large-scaled instances with satisfying results within reasonale time.The case study shows that different situations demands different combination of charging stations.The case study also shows that the combination of fast charging station and super-fast charging station is the optimal solution for several scenarios in inter-city transportation,and fast charging station 1s most suitable for the intra-city transportation case.