The electric vehicle routing problem with shared charging stations

We introduce the electric vehicle routing problem with shared charging stations (E-VRP-SCS). The E-VRP-SCS extends the electric vehicle routing problem with nonlinear charging function (E-VRP-NL) by considering several companies that jointly invest in charging stations (CSs). The objective is to minimize the sum of the fixed opening cost of CSs and the drivers cost. The problem consists of deciding the location and technology of the CSs and building the routes for each company. It is solved by means of a multistart heuristic that performs an adaptive large neighborhood search coupled with the solution of mixed integer linear programs. It also contains a number of advanced efficient procedures tailored to handle specific components of the E-VRP-SCS. We perform extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances. We assess the competitiveness of the heuristic on the E-VRP-NL and derive 38 new best known solutions. New benchmark results on the E-VRP-SCS are presented, solved, and analyzed.