Optimization of multi-depot electric vehicle routing

Abstract

For the sake of efficiency and cost reduction, it is important to find optimal routes for vehicles in the logistics industry. Moreover, electric vehicles are an emerging trend and their usage in logistics has aroused a lot of interest. In this project, it is assumed that there are multiple depots, and electric vehicles are assigned to deliver goods to customers under the load constraints. The duration of delivering all goods is taken as a measure to reflect the goodness of the routes, so as to ensure the quality of the delivery service. The situation where the electric vehicles run out of battery and need to look for a charge point is also considered. The optimization problem is solved by designing and implementing an evolutionary algorithm in software. The effectiveness of the design is verified based on some benchmark problem sets and real-time traffic condition obtained by the Google API. Lastly, the impacts of operational parameters on the searching ability of the designed algorithm are investigated.