Pickup and delivery problem with electric vehicles and time windows considering queues

Abstract

The electric vehicle, as a green and sustainable technology, has gained tremendous development and application recently in the logistics distribution system. However, the increasing workload and limited infrastructure capacity pose challenges for electric vehicles in the pickup and delivery operating system, including task allocation, electric vehicle routing, and queue scheduling. To address these issues, this paper introduces a pickup and delivery problem with electric vehicles and time windows considering queues, which considers queue scheduling for multiple electric vehicles when operating at the same site. A novel mixed integer linear programming model is proposed to minimize the cost of travel distance and queue time. An adaptive hybrid neighborhood search algorithm is developed to solve the moderately large-scale problem. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the model and adaptive hybrid neighborhood search algorithm. The competitive performance of the developed algorithm is further confirmed by finding 9 new best solutions for the pickup and delivery problem with electric vehicles and time windows benchmark instances. Moreover, the results and sensitivity analysis of objective weight costs highlight the impact and importance of considering queues in the studied problem and obtain some management insights.