Objectives

In this project we will focus on the  objective of managing operations of business fleet in the context of urban logistic. More precisely, starting from real case studies of charging and routing with electric vehicles in urban logistic, we will develop models, optimization methods and decision making tools that manage the landscape of the ecosystem of electric vehicle at tactical and operational level. In this context, EVERS identifies the following three main scientific objectives.

  1. Integrated charging infrastructure facility network location and EV routing. The first objective concerns the development of methodological solutions for integrated charging infrastructure allocation, EV routing and charging scheduling. Our objective will be to develop new models and solution methods to tackle this issue. To better guide our research towards practical applications, we will apply our models and methods on well-identified practical case studies.
  2. Joint periodic electric vehicle routing and charging planning. While the first objective was focused on the daily planning, we propose with the second objective to concentrate on the weekly planning. The design of weekly transportation plans arises in diverse applications in urban logistics, such as the collection of recyclables or mails, the routing of healthcare nurses, the transportation of elderly or disabled persons, etc. Our objective will be to develop efficient models and solutions methods to find optimized routing and charging schedules over the time horizon of one week.
  3. Operational decision in dynamic EV routing. Vehicle traffic in cities is subject to a lot of uncertainties. For instance, when the traffic conditions, or weather conditions increase the energy consumption, some EVs will be not able to perform all tasks assigned to them. Thus, EV routes must be redefined to dispatch the existing requests between the available EV. For this  reason, developing methods able to handle effectively dynamic events is also a major issue in the context of city logistics. Thus, with this third objective, we propose to explore dynamic extensions of the models developed above, considering uncertainty in data description. New models and robust solution methods will be propose to handle the dynamic EV issues.

Project structure

EVERS project is organized into six work packages.

  1. WP0. Project Management
  2. WP1. Scientific and technologic State of the Art and Case-Studies
  3. WP2. Integrated charging infrastructure facility network location and EV routing
  4. WP3. Joint periodic EV routing and charging planning
  5. WP4. Dynamic EV routing
  6. WP5. Prototyping, validation and dissemination