Applications of Electric Vehicles in Instant Deliveries

Big cities affected by intense mobility, traffic and pollution are adopting electrification-based solutions for the reduction of the CO2 emissions of combustion engines. An interesting field in which the transition toward electrification can achieve important benefits is the area of instant deliveries. Instant deliveries deal with the mobility related to commercial trades between suppliers and customers. In this respect, optimal solutions can be considered during route planning based on the minimization of several metrics, such as distance, energy and road slope, among others. To this end, this paper presents an optimal solution to the instant deliveries problem in which the result is the optimal route, in the city under study, that minimizes energy consumption based on road slope and total distance traveled, and that gives higher priority to routes that include cycling infrastructure that the city can provide. The paper uses electric bikes since they are easily transportable and are highly versatile for instant deliveries. The results obtained were compared to a previous version of the optimal algorithm already published by the authors which minimizes the Haversine and Euclidian distances only. It was found that the shortest distance travelled between customers does not necessarily imply the least energy consumption. The latter, in combination with an energy consumption estimation approach, represent the original contribution of the work.