A multi-compartment electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and temperature and humidity settings for perishable product delivery

• Published in: Expert systems with applications 2023-12, Vol.233, p.120974, Article 120974
• Main Authors: Wang, Xin, Liang, Yijing, Tang, Xiangbo, Jiang, Xiyan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adaptive large neighborhood search; Electric vehicle routing; Multi-compartments; Perishable products; Tabu search
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120974

Perishable product delivery has been a notable challenge due to the nature of perishability and high customer expectations. Recently, emerging technologies such as electric and multi-compartment vehicles have been applied to facilitate perishable product deliveries with less deterioration and carbon emissions. Accordingly, new management problems are placed including setting environmental conditions of compartments, routing and scheduling the recharging of vehicles. To deal with these difficulties, we introduce the multi-compartment electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and temperature and humidity settings (MCEVRP-th). A mathematical formulation is proposed, and a hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search and tabu search heuristic (ALNS/TS), which allows generating infeasible solutions, is developed. Extensive experiments assess the performance of the proposed algorithm based on the modified benchmark and real-world instances, and several management insights are derived. •An electric vehicle routing problem for perishable products is studied.•Multi-compartments, temperature and humidity settings of vehicles are considered.•We present a hybrid ALNS/TS algorithm to solve the problem.•Extensive experiments are conducted, and management insights are derived.