In order to reduce the climate impact of the transportation industry, fossil fuel-driven trucks are being replaced by more sustainable alternatives, like electric trucks. Electric trucks, however, mark a significant change in operations for the trucking industry, since they typically need to stop and recharge for longer periods of time at some points during their trips. Poorly planned charging stops can potentially lead to hours of additional downtime during the workday, greatly reducing the efficiency of operations.
This new challenge has led to an uptick in research into the Electrical Vehicle Routing Problem (EVRP) [1], a variation of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), which is a classical NP-hard optimization problem, first introduced in 1959 by Dantzig and Ramser [2]. In the VRP, one tries to find routes for a fleet of vehicles that jointly fulfill a set of requested deliveries, all while minimizing the total cost of operations for the owner of the vehicles. The EVRP concerns the same problem, but with the additional complication of having to decide when and where each truck should stop and charge.
In order to contribute to these research developments, Volvo Group, headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, has launched a research project together with Chalmers University of Technology [3]. Within the scope of the project, titled “New conditions for optimized freight transport solutions”, Joseph Löfving is doing an industrial PhD in mathematical optimization at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg, focusing on the EVRP. He is joined by Jonathan Stål—industrial PhD student at the Department of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers—the collaboration with whom brings the optimization effort closer to the true business needs of the actors in the transportation network.
What sets this project apart from other EVRP research is, above all, its interdisciplinary nature; by closely tying the EVRP research to research into concrete business cases, the resulting models are more likely to accurately capture the details that are truly relevant to trucking companies, and the developed algorithms will be able to better optimize their routes and increase their efficiency. All in all, the research project will be instrumental for Volvo to be able to offer appropriate planning tools that help its customers electrify their truck fleets while maximizing their efficiency, bringing us all closer to a future with a decarbonized transportation industry.
References
[1] I. Kucukoglu, R. Dewil, and D. Cattrysse (2021). The Electric Vehicle Routing Problem and its Variations: A Literature Review. Computers & Industrial Engineering 161.
[2] G. B. Dantzig and J. H. Ramser (1959). The Truck Dispatching Problem. Management Science 6.1.
[3] A.-B. Strömberg (2024). New Conditions for Optimized Freight Transport Solutions. Chalmers Research. https://research.chalmers.se/en/project/11230