The two-echelon capacitated electric vehicle routing problem with battery swapping stations: Formulation and efficient methodology

In this paper, we present a two-echelon capacitated electric vehicle routing problem with battery swapping stations (2E-EVRP-BSS), which aims to determine the delivery strategy under battery driving range limitations for city logistics. The electric vehicles operating in the different echelons have different load capacities, battery driving ranges, power consumption rates, and battery swapping costs. We propose an integer programming formulation and a hybrid algorithm that combines a column generation and an adaptive large neighborhood search (CG-ALNS) to solve the problem. We conducted extensive computational experiments, demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model, and show the efficiency of the CG-ALNS algorithm. In addition, we explore the interplay between battery driving range and the effectiveness of vehicle emission reduction through sensitivity analysis.