Conflict-Free Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Capacitated Charging Stations and Partial Recharge

The adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) grows in rapid fashion in the transportation industry. However, limited battery capacity of EVs and the lack of charging facilities become challenges to obtain efficient route plans. In this paper, we propose a variant of electric vehicle routing problems considering the limited charging capacity at each station and the possibility of strategic partial recharging. A heuristic method, based on variable neighborhood search and tabu search, with simple charging time adjustment processes is presented to solve large instances of the problem. The proposed capacitated E-VRP model is tested with small size instances with a commercial optimization solver, while the heuristic method is implemented on both small and large instances. The main conclusion is that the battery capacity of the EVs and the number of chargers can significantly affect the total traveled distance.