A new model for minimizing the electric vehicle battery capacity in electric\rtravelling salesman problem with time windows

Abstract

The growing pollution in the environment and the negative shift in the global climate compel authorities\rto take action to protect the environment and human health. Transportation is one of the major contributors to this\renvironmental decay. The harmful gases released to the air by the vehicles using petroleum fuel increase each day. One\rof the solutions is to make a gradual transition to electric vehicles. A major part of manufacturing an electric vehicle\ris to produce an efficient electric motor and battery for it. Reducing the manufacturing and operating costs of these\rcomponents will result in reducing the overall costs of electric vehicles. In this study a new variant of the electric\rtravelling salesman problem with time windows (E-TSPTW) was proposed. The objective function of the problem is to\rminimize the required initial battery capacity of the electric vehicle. For this goal a new energy consumption model\rconsidering the load of the vehicle was proposed with three scenarios. The proposed model was solved with a hybrid\rsimulated annealing algorithm for all these scenarios. The performance of the proposed method was compared to the\rsolutions found by a mixed integer linear programming model. The experimental results on the benchmark instances\rshow that up to a 35% reduction in initial battery capacity hence reduction in its cost is possible.\r