Electric vehicle routing problem

Abstract

There has been a global push towards protecting the environment, and adaptation of Electric Vehicles (EVs) is one of the crucial initiatives taken by multiple governments. EVs are expected to reduce pollution by decreasing the usage of fossil fuels by using sustainable sources of energy like lithium cell batteries. As the awareness of EVs has increased, there have been efforts to resolve issues in setting up the infrastructure due to battery limitations. Simultaneously, there has been an increased interest among the academicians to model different real-life problems and find optimal algorithms to solve them. Our study aims at understanding the differences between traditional VRP (Vehicle Routing Problem) and EVRP (Electric Vehicle Routing Problem), and the reasons why it makes EVRP a much complex problem to solve. We also try to understand the variations in EVRP, which are receiving more attention across geographies and across time by doing a literature survey of existing research papers. Although the Indian government has been at the forefront to develop a sustainable plan for adopting the EVs, the results obtained from this study show that there is a lack of research in India in EVRP compared to China, the USA, etc. Further, we have tried to model a real-life problem of bus routing in the Indian context using multi-graphs and suggested methods to obtain an optimal solution.