Artificial Bee Colony Approach to Solving the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem

抄録

Because of the deterioration of the environment in many major cities, currently great efforts have been put on encouraging the use of greener transport modes. As electric vehicles are environmentally friendly, considerably more electric vehicles are expected on roads in the near future. This paper studies the electric vehicle routing problem, which is based on the conventional vehicle routing problem but electric vehicles are used for serving customers. An enhanced artificial bee colony algorithm is adopted as a solution method. To reduce the number of vehicles in the solution, a route elimination procedure is proposed and incorporated into the algorithm. Three methods of inserting recharging stations into solutions are discussed and used. Computation tests are performed to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm and the impact of algorithmic parameters. The results show that even for the large network instances, the algorithm can get good solutions using small computing times.