Two-Echelon Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Electric vehicles (EVs) are widely used in urban last-mile logistics. This paper addresses a two-echelon electric vehicle routing problem with time windows (2E-EVRPTW). Traditional vehicles, which depart from a single depot, are operated on the first echelon to serve intermediate satellite stations, while EVs depart from these satellite stations to deliver products to customers. Due to the limited battery capacity of EVs, access to charging stations needs to be considered in the route. This study aims to find the optimal routes in both echelons such that the total transportation costs, including vehicle cost, driving cost, charging cost, and carbon emissions cost, are minimized. We propose a mixed-integer linear program for the 2E-EVRPTW, which is solved directly by a commercial solver CPLEX. To solve this NP-hard problem, we develop adaptive large neighborhood search-based heuristic method. Results show that the proposed method can find high-quality solutions in reasonable CPU time.