A HEURISTIC APPROACH FOR THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM

Electric vehicles are gaining popularity as companies strive to employ more sustainable solutions. Due to their higher costs compared to traditional vehicles, applying operations research techniques becomes critical to ensure efficiency and cost competitiveness. This paper presents a mathematical model and a heuristic approach to solve the electrical vehicle routing problem for a last mile delivery scenario with capacity and battery restrictions. The heuristic approach employs a modified version of the Split algorithm that delivers the optimal breakdown into routes for a given sequence of customers. In order to improve the efficiency, a two-phase process is proposed. First, we remove the battery restrictions and get a good quality solution for the corresponding CVRP. Second, we use the solution for the CVRP as the initial solution for the EVRP using the modified Split algorithm with a local search heuristic.