Electric Vehicle Routing Problem

I. ASSIGNMENT A. Problem Statement This semestral project is motivated by the IEEE WCCI-2020 Competition on Evolutionary Computation for the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (EVRP) [Mav20]. The content of Section I is, therefore, mostly taken over from the provided technical report [MMT20]. The EVRP can be described as follows: given a fleet of EVs, we need to find the best possible route for each EV within their battery charge level limits. The EVs must start and end at the central depot and serve a set of customers. The objective is to minimize the total distance traveled, while each customer is visited exactly once, for every EV route the total demand of customers does not exceed the EV’s maximal carrying capacity and the total energy consumption does not exceed the EV’s maximal battery charge level. All EVs begin and end at the depot, EVs always leave the charging station fully charged (or fully charged an loaded, in case of the depot), and the charging stations (including the depot) can be visited multiple times by any EV. The EVRP can be mathematically formulated as follows: