The mixed fleet vehicle routing problem with partial recharging by multiple chargers: A formulation and an insertion based constructive heuristic

In this study, the Mixed Fleet Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (MF-E-VRP) with Partial Recharging by Multiple Chargers is considered. It composes of electric and internal combustion vehicles. The travelled distance and carried load on vehicles are taken into account in the emission function of internal combustion vehicles and the energy consumption function of electric vehicles. Additionally, selection of one of the multiple charging configurations at the charging station is addressed for the first time in the MF-E-VRP. The problem can be described as obtaining vehicle routes that minimize the total cost while meeting customer delivery demands. First, we develop a mixed integer mathematical programming formulation for the KF-E-ARP. Because of the NP-hardness of the problem, we propose an insertion based constructive heuristic algorithm to solve medium-and large-size instances in reasonable computation times. Computational analysis indicates that in a very short computation time, i.e., around 1 second, the proposed insertion based constructive heuristic attains feasible solutions on all medium-and large-size benchmark instances which mathematical model fails within 2 hours.