Location-Routing Problem for Electric Delivery Vehicles with Mobile Charging Trailers

With an increase in direct-to-consumer deliveries, growing fuel costs and environmental impact have become major concerns for delivery fleets. Fleet electrification is a promising solution to reduce operating costs and carbon footprint. The major barriers to fleet electrification are the limited range of electric vehicles (EVs) and limited charging infrastructure. To address these issues, this paper proposed a new concept of using one delivery EV together with a towable mobile charging trailer (MCT) for delivery. In addition, this study proposed a two-echelon genetic algorithm-variable neighborhood search (GA-VNS) to solve the continuous location routing problem (LRP). Simulation results showed that, by optimally locating an MCT and routing, the delivery EV was able to cover the same service area with reduced EV range and thus battery size. Compared to the baseline case (i.e., return-to-the-base charging), the proposed operational concept and algorithm can help significantly reduce the total travel distance and the total energy consumption by up to 57.57% and 49.72%, respectively. The proposed operational concept and algorithm can potentially help fleet owners reduce operating costs and the number of vehicles in various delivery tasks.