| Summary: | Electric vehicles (EVs) are anticipated to play a critical role in the green transportation of the future. Logistics companies have started several projects operating with EVs in road transportation. However, routing decisions for EVs must take limited driving ranges into account. Previous related research on electric vehicle location routing problems (EVLRP) has investigated intra route facilities that support the energy supply network. Contrarily, this paper studies a new type of EVLRP with a restricted distance, where EVs are used for route planning in reverse flow logistics. The model is formulated from a real case problem in agriculture that combines both locating multiple depots and determining routing paths with a limited distance constraint. An adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm has been extended into four combinations and is proposed here for solving the problem. The computational results indicate that the ALNS algorithm can obtain quality solutions in short processing time when compared with software using exact methods. Furthermore, the proposed ALNS algorithm is applied to a case study problem to provide suitable locations and vehicle routes with a minimized total cost.
|
|---|