An evolutionary algorithm driving by dimensionality reduction operator and knowledge model for the electric vehicle routing problem with flexible charging strategy

Abstract

The digital economy and digital technology are promoting the integrated development of industry and digital, forming a new path for industrial upgrading and building a new development pattern.In today's context of digital economy and green transformation, it is a challenging optimization problem to scientifically plan the logistics routes of electric vehicles (EVs) when taking charging strategies into consideration. Aiming at the drawback of supposing a fixed charging rate in the traditional EV routing problems (EVRPs), the charging data of a type of mainstream EVs were collected and the instantaneous charging power was simulated in the real scenario. To solve problems of the fixed charge timing and charged energy in traditional EVRP models and partial charging strategies, a new EVRP model considering the flexible charging strategy (EVRP-FCS) by taking the charged energy as one of the decision variables. To effectively solve the model and fully search in the solution space, an improved evolutionary algorithm was proposed. The performance advantages of the algorithm are determined by comparison of 22 groups of large-scale experimental examples. The experimental results have demonstrated the performance advantages of the algorithm.