Urban freight distribution with electric vehicles: comparing some solution procedures

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well-known discrete optimization problem that has an impact on theoretical and practical applications. In this paper, a freight distribution model that includes a charging system located at the depot, making it feasible for real world-implementation, is proposed. Two different solution methods are proposed and compared: a genetic algorithm (GA) and a population-based simulated annealing (PBSA) with the number of moves increasing during the iterations. Among the variety of algorithm used to solve the VRP, population-based search methods are the most useful, due to the ability to update the memory at each iteration. To demonstrate the practical aspects of the proposed solution a case study is solved using travel time on a real network to evaluate the potentiality for a real-world application.