New mathematical modelling for an electric vehicle inventory-routing problem

Transportation industry activities have a significant negative impact on the environment, economy and human health. To reduce the environmental impact strategies, such as using electric vehicles, is taken into account. This paper presents a new mathematical model related to the electric vehicle inventory-routing problem. The objective function of the proposed model is to minimize the total cost of this system. Vehicles are considered as electrical device and due to the limited capacity of the batteries, the driving range is limited. Hence, if the battery is over, there is a possibility of swapping the battery at the battery swapping stations. In the proposed model, the shortage is not allowed and the customer demand is certain and determined. Because the proposed problem is categorized as NP-hard one, a meta-heuristic algorithm, namely variable neighborhood search (VNS), is proposed to solve large-scale problems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed VNS, numerical results are compared with the exact method and the simulated annealing (SA) method. The computational results show the proper performance of the proposed VNS.