The Electric Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows And Battery Swapping Stations

Nowadays electric vehicles are more and more popular,and they can make a lot contribution to the energy security and environmental protection.This paper presents an electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and battery swapping stations,namely EVRPTW-BSS.It has more advantages towards the one with charging stations.Existing research mainly concentrated on traditional vehicles and recharging electric vehicle routing problems,which provide us so many ideas to research further,but the research of battery swapping EVRP is still at the initial stage.We established a new model and solved the small instances with Gurobi optimizer and make a detailed analysis.This can provide some insight to the development of electric vehicle industry.The problem was described as this: a logistics fleet of the same kind of electric vehicles will fulfill the demand of all customers in the serve area by means of delivery operation with a fixed battery swapping time,also take the time windows of customers into consideration.It was a mixed integer programming problem which can be solved by some exact algorithm.Different objectives were set to test the feasibility of the model,such as minimizing the number of vehicles used,minimization of distance traveled,and minimization of costs.Environment for optimizing and parameters were set and discussed in details.Small instances of benchmark problem are testified by Gurobi optimizer.Besides minimization of travel distance,objectives of minimizing vehicles used and minimizing costs are also conducted.The results show that the objective of cost with reasonable coefficients is best.Furthermore,the effect of different parameters such as the rate of battery consumption and the swap time is analyzed.In addition,models of swapping and recharging and a new defined model called ultimate model are compared under the same parameter setting,drawing a conclusion that the swapping one is better than the recharging one and the ultimate model is best.This paper could lay a solid foundation for the follow-up study of the battery swapping electric vehicles.