A heuristic approach for the green vehicle routing problem with multiple technologies and partial recharges

•New VRP with electric vehicles, considering partial recharges and several recharge technologies.•Constructive and improving heuristics embedded in a Simulated Annealing framework.•Computational study of the performance of the proposed algorithms on varying instances and particular problems.•Analysis of the impact of the different elements of the problem: geography, size, technologies, etc.

This paper presents several heuristics for a variation of the vehicle routing problem in which the transportation fleet is composed of electric vehicles with limited autonomy in need for recharge during their duties. In addition to the routing plan, the amount of energy recharged and the technology used must also be determined. Constructive and local search heuristics are proposed, which are exploited within a non deterministic Simulated Annealing framework. Extensive computational results on varying instances are reported, evaluating the performance of the proposed algorithms and analyzing the distinctive elements of the problem (size, geographical configuration, recharge stations, autonomy, technologies, etc.).