Routing and Scheduling an Electric Vehicle Fleet Handling Dynamic Customer Requests

Ongoing worldwide environmental issues along with oftenvoiced consumer concerns have paved the way so that governments legislate and help usher into operation alternative-fueled vehicles and pertinent infrastructures. In this regard, battery-powered electric vehicles have been introduced in the last decade and the service industry has been deploying such trucks in their distribution networks. However, electric vehicles do impose limitations as far as their traveling range is concerned. Moreover, replenishing the power to the vehicle batteries may entail lengthy charging visits at respective stations. In this paper, we examine the problem of routing and scheduling a fleet of electric vehicles that seek to satisfy dynamic pickup and delivery requests in an urban environment. We develop a web application to facilitate cooperation between organizations and individuals involved in urban freight transport. Geolocation services and mobile devices enable us to manage the fleet and make timely decisions. Moreover, we propose three heuristic-based recharging strategies to ensure that electric vehicles can restore their energy levels in an effective manner. Through detailed simulation experiments, we show that the costs associated with the use of an electric vehicle fleet concern mainly the size of the fleet. The impact regarding the total route length traveled is less evident for all our strategies.