This paper introduces an alternative to intra-route recharging of Electric Commercial Vehicles (ECVs) used for freight distribution by exploiting new pertinent technological developments that make mobile battery swapping possible. The Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Synchronised Mobile Battery Swapping (EVRPTW-SMBS) is introduced in which route planning is carried out in two interdependent levels: (i) for the ECVs to deliver customers’ demands, and (ii) for the Battery Swapping Vans (BSVs) to swap the depleted battery on an ECV with a fully charged one at a designated time and space. Each BSV route can provide the battery swapping service to multiple ECVs, and each ECV can extend its autonomy by requesting the battery swapping service for as many times as required with no need to divert from its original delivery route. The EVRPTW-SMBS opens up multiple opportunities to facilitate eco-friendly goods distribution using ECVs and brings in extra flexibility and cost savings. At the same time, it is a challenging problem to tackle mainly due to the interdependence problem that stems from the spatio-temporal synchronisation requirement between the vehicles in the two levels (i.e. ECVs and BSVs). To tackle these complications, the paper proposes a methodology for exact evaluation of an EVRPTW-SMBS solution based on a two-stage hybridisation of a dynamic programming and an integer programming algorithm, and places the resulting procedure at the heart of an intensified large neighbourhood search algorithm to solve instances of the EVRPTW-SMBS efficiently. A library of EVRPTW-SMBS test instances is developed and used to demonstrate the added value of the proposed problem variant and the efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Our results demonstrate the benefits of using BSVs in the design of the delivery routes for ECVs, and indicate that a particular variant of the proposed algorithms which is based on a specific lexicographical decomposition routine can efficiently approximate the optimal solution to the EVRPTW-SMBS.

本文通过利用新的相关技术发展（使移动电池交换成为可能），介绍了用于货运的电动商用车（ECV）的路线内充电的替代方法。引入了带有时间窗和同步移动电池交换的电动汽车路由问题（EVRPTW-SMBS），其中路由计划在两个相互依赖的级别上进行：（i）ECV满足客户需求，（ii）电池交换货车（BSV），可在指定的时间和空间将ECV上的电量耗尽的电池与充满电的电池交换。每个BSV路线都可以为多个ECV提供电池更换服务，并且每个ECV可以通过请求电池更换服务任意多次次数来扩展其自治性，而无需转移其原始交付路线。EVRPTW-SMBS为利用ECV促进环境友好的商品分销提供了多种机会，并带来了更多的灵活性和成本节省。同时，要解决这一挑战也是一个挑战性的问题，这主要是由于两个级别的车辆（即ECV和BSV）之间的时空同步要求产生了相互依赖性问题。为了解决这些复杂性，本文提出了一种基于动态规划和整数规划算法的两阶段混合，对EVRPTW-SMBS解决方案进行精确评估的方法，并将所得过程置于密集大邻域搜索的核心有效解决EVRPTW-SMBS实例的算法。开发了一个EVRPTW-SMBS测试实例库，并用于演示所提出的问题变体的附加值和所提出算法的效率。我们的结果证明了在设计ECV的交付路线时使用BSV的好处，并表明基于特定词典顺序的拟议算法的特定变体可以有效地逼近EVRPTW-SMBS的最佳解决方案。