Important factors to daily vehicle routing cost of battery electric delivery trucks
Jane Lin, Wei Zhou
Abstract
This study investigates the effects of key technological and operating factors on daily routing of battery electric truck (BET) in urban goods delivery. The key factors are service area, number of customers, battery capacity, number of charging stations, vehicle capacity, and charging rate. A primary cost metric used is daily vehicle routing cost (DVRC), which is defined as the sum of driver salary associated with driving time and idling time for en-route battery recharging activities, and electricity (energy) cost. It is estimated with a proposed green EVRP (G-EVRP) model. Overall, BET works with the economies of scale. However, BET may be better suited for a market place with high number of customers (customer density) at a city or a county scale but often technologically or financially constrained at a regional (intercity) scale. For a given network size and number of customers, battery capacity must be carefully chosen to minimize the BET DVRC. Vehicle capacity affects the number of vehicles needed to dispatch and the optimal fleet size is a compromise between the level of consolidation and that of en-route recharging activity. Little effect is found in number of charging stations on BET daily routing in the study setting as optimal routing strategies typically result in either zero or very low en-route recharging activity level.