Applications of operations research in urban mobility with a special focus on electric vehicles

Abstract : The worldwide proportion of people living in urban areas is expected to rise in the coming decades, reaching 67% by 2050. This growth gives rise to multiple challenges in urban mobility regarding passenger and goods transport while considering local and global pollutant emissions. This tutorial will start by posing major current and future challenges in urban mobility. We will then explore basic applications of operations research methods for urban mobility starting from shortest/fastest path calculations, over to the traveling salesman and vehicle routing problems. We will explore recent developments with regards to methods taking into account dynamic travel times and energy consumption. Finally we will present recent research results on electric vehicle routing problem variants. We will give some detailed descriptions of models and modelling challenges with regards to the consideration of energy consumption and recharging. We then present several different exact and heuristic solution approaches and case studies that have been proposed in the last years.