Abstract:

In this paper, the authors consider a parcel delivery company's consistent vehicle routing problem for delivering parcels with electric vehicles in Austria. It assumes that cars can only be charged with electricity between their delivery tours in the morning and their pickup trips in the afternoon because it is based on a real-world problem. For this purpose, a charging station with limited charging slots is available at the depot. The authors aim to generate a set of vehicle routes that are driver- and time-consistent and efficiently use limited charging resources while optimizing the sum of vehicle fixed cost, vehicle/driver operating time, arrival time consistency, and driver consistency. This study presents a mathematical model to describe the problem in detail. For solving the real-world situation, a template-based Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search is developed, complemented with constraint programming for charging management and quadratic programming for delivery and pickup trip schedules. Computational experiments for different settings and scenarios are presented and analyzed based on data. from an Austrian parcel delivery company.