Electric Vehicle Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone with Partial recharge Policy

Abstract

In (Zhu et al., 2022), it proposes an electric vehicle traveling salesman problem with drone while assuming that the electric vehicle (EV) is a battery-electric vehicle whose energy could be refreshed in a battery swap station in minutes. In this paper, we extend the work in (Zhu et al., 2022) by relaxing the fixed-time-full-charge assumption, assuming that the EV is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that could be partially recharged in a charging station. This problem is named electric vehicle traveling salesman problem with drone with partial recharge policy (EVTSPD-P). A three-index MILP formulation is proposed to solve the EVTSPD-P with linear and non-linear charging functions where the concave time-state-of-charge (SoC) function is approximated using piecewise linear functions, a technique proposed in Montoya et al. (2017) and Zuo et al. (2019). Furthermore, a specially designed adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) meta-heuristic, which incorporates constraint programming (CP), is presented to solve EVTSPD-P problem instances of practical size. The numerical analysis results indicate that the proposed ALNS method is more efficient than variable neighborhood search and has an average optimality gap of about 3% when solving instances with ten nodes. Besides, using a piecewise linear function with a six-line-segments approximation has an average of 10.8% less cost than a linear approximation.