Multi-depot electric vehicle routing problem with fuzzy time windows and pickup/delivery constraints

Abstract

The use of an Electric Vehicle (EV), particularly in different operations of goods distribution is a solution for salvaging the crowded cities of the world from air and noise pollutions as well as Green House Gas (GHG) emission. This paper presents a Multi-Depot Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (MD-EVRP) with recharging stations by considering the expected penalty of fuzzy time windows in pickup/delivery. Since the MD-EVRP with Fuzzy Time Windows and Pickup/Delivery (MD-EVRP-FTW-PD) constraints is an NP-hard problem, three meta-heuristics (i.e., Simulated Annealing (SA), Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) and a hybrid of SA and VNS (VNS-SA)) are used to solve such a hard problem. The parameters of these algorithms are measured by the Taguchi experimental design method. The proposed hybrid VNS-SA algorithm is more efficient in comparison with other algorithms.

Keywords

• electric vehicle routing
• green house gas emission
• fuzzy time windows
• simulated annealing
• variable neighborhood search