Optimal operation strategies for freight transport with electric vehicles considering wireless charging lanes

Unlike traditional recharging at fixed stations, wireless charging lanes equipped on the road network enable electric vehicles (EVs) to recharge while in motion, reducing the time required for EV recharging. Indeed, the availability of wireless charging lanes allows the urban freight transport service operators to consider adjusting EVs routing plan to do EV recharging in transit so that the total operational costs can be further reduced. Envisioning that wireless charging lanes would be practically constructed on the road network, this study aims to investigate how the optimal EV routing plan can be determined in a pickup and delivery problem in the future electrified mobility system. The problem is formulated into a mixed-integer programming model, and we propose a branch-and-price algorithm to solve it. Additionally, a large neighborhood search heuristic is incorporated within the column generation framework to effectively tackle the sub-problems. Computational experiments on test instances highlight the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and demonstrate the potential of wireless charging lanes to reduce total operational costs.