Electric vehicle routing problem with recharging stations for minimizing energy consumption

Due to growing environmental concerns about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, people are more incline to use electric vehicles in various distribution services. Because of the limited battery capacity, electric vehicles are required to visit recharging stations en-route. Therefore, the routing schemes of conventional vehicles may not be suitable as the routing schemes of electric vehicles. In this paper, the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (EVRP) is introduced, and the corresponding mathematical model is formulated. The EVRP seeks to minimize the energy consumption of electric vehicles. The comprehensive calculation of energy consumption used by electric vehicles is provided in the EVRP model. An ant colony (AC) algorithm based meta-heuristics is proposed as the solution method of the EVRP. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is evaluated through extensive numerical experiments on the newly generated instances. We also illustrate the benefits of using an energy consumption minimizing objective function rather than a distance-minimizing objective function for routing electric vehicles.