Collaborative electric vehicle routing with meet points

TL;DR

This paper introduces a collaborative routing approach for electric vehicles in urban logistics, optimizing meet points and profit sharing to reduce costs and environmental impact while increasing individual profits.

Contribution

It presents a novel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model and a metaheuristic solution for collaborative electric vehicle routing with meet points, validated through real-world and large-scale case studies.

Findings

Collaboration reduces total energy consumption and costs.

Sharing customers increases individual company profits.

The approach scales to large urban logistics networks.

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a profit-sharing-based optimal routing mechanism to incentivize horizontal collaboration among urban goods distributors. This paper investigates a collaborative routing problem for urban logistics, in which the exchange of goods at meet points is optimally planned en route. We show that collaboration does not only reduce the total cost but also increases the profit of each company by sharing some customers and the related profit. Hence, we focus on solving a collaborative electric vehicle routing problem under constraints such as customer-specific time windows, opportunity charging, vehicle capacity, and meet-point synchronization. The proposed Collaborative Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Meet Point (CoEVRPMP) is modeled as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem. We first present an exact method for optimal benchmarks via decomposition. To handle real-world problems, we suggest using a metaheuristic method: adaptive large neighborhood search with linear programming. The viability and scalability of the collaborative method are demonstrated via numerical case studies: (i) a real-world case of two grocery stores in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, and (ii) a large-scale experiment with 500 customers. The results underline the importance of horizontal collaboration among delivery companies. Collaboration helps to reduce the environmental footprint (total energy consumed) and to increase the individual company's profit at the same time.