Collaborative electric vehicle routing with meet points

Preprint, 2023

In this paper, we develop a profit-sharing-based optimal routing mechanism to incentivize horizontal collaboration among urban goods distributors. This paper investigates a collaborative routing problem for urban logistics, in which the exchange of goods at meet points is optimally planned en route. We show that collaboration does not only reduce the total cost but also increases the profit of each company by sharing some customers and the related profit. Hence, we focus on solving a collaborative electric vehicle routing problem under constraints such as customer-specific time windows, opportunity charging, vehicle capacity, and meet-point synchronization. The proposed Collaborative Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Meet Point (CoEVRPMP) is modeled as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem. We first present an exact method for optimal benchmarks via decomposition. To handle real-world problems, we suggest using a metaheuristic method: adaptive large neighborhood search with linear programming. The viability and scalability of the collaborative method are demonstrated via numerical case studies: (i) a real-world case of two grocery stores in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, and (ii) a large-scale experiment with 500 customers. The results underline the importance of horizontal collaboration among delivery companies. Collaboration helps to reduce the environmental footprint (total energy consumed) and to increase the individual company's profit at the same time.