A Matheuristic for the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Capacitated Charging Stations

Aurélien Froger (1) , Jorge E. Mendoza (1) , Ola Jabali (2) , Gilbert Laporte (2)

1 LIFAT - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale et Appliquée de Tours
2 CIRRELT - Laboratoire CIRRELT Université Laval Quebec

Existing research on Electric vehicle routing problems (E-VRPs) assumes that charging stations (CSs) can simultaneously charge an unlimited number of electric vehicles. In practice, however, CSs have a limited number of chargers. In this research, we investigate the impact of considering these capacity restrictions. We focus on the electric vehicle routing problem with nonlinear charging function (E-VRP-NL). We first extend existing mixed integer linear programming formulations of the E-VRP-NL to deal with capacitated CSs. We then present a route-first assemble-second matheuristic to tackle the problem. In the first stage of this method, we rely on an existing metaheuristic to generate a pool of high-quality routes while relaxing the capacity constraints. In the second stage, we use a Benders' like decomposition to assemble a solution to the problem by assembling routes from the pool. We evaluate four different assembling strategies. The results suggest that our algorithm performs well on a set of instances adapted from the literature.

Domaines: Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]

Aurélien Froger, Jorge E. Mendoza, Ola Jabali, Gilbert Laporte. A Matheuristic for the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Capacitated Charging Stations. [Research Report] Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur les reseaux d'entreprise, la logistique et le transport (CIRRELT). 2017. ⟨hal-01559524⟩