The electric vehicle routing problem with partial recharge and vehicle recycling

In this paper, a new variant of the electric vehicle (EV) routing problem, which considers heterogeneous EVs, partial recharge, and vehicle recycling, is investigated based on logistic companies' practical operation. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed to formulate the problem. For small-scale scenarios, commercial solver, e.g., CPLEX, is leveraged. For large-scale instances faced by practical applications, a hybrid metaheuristic is designed through integrating a modified Greedy Algorithm with the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS). The proposed algorithm was tested by real-world instances from JD, an e-commerce enterprise in China. Computational results indicate that partial recharge and vehicle recycling can save costs effectively. It also shows that the number of charging stations is an important factor for the application of EVs.