Electric vehicles routing and scheduling challenges within urban logistic – EVERS

Several cities around the world face transport problems. As they become larger, traffic congestion, energy consumption, and carbon emissions are increasing, imposing huge costs on economies and many adverse consequences in terms of environment and quality of life for citizens.
Electric vehicles (EV) provide a major opportunity for decarbonizing transport, and transportation activities in urban cities. Even if governmental incentives tend to increase the part of EVs in the current fleets for the coming years the electric car industry is still facing two weaknesses. The first one is the limited EV driving range and the second weakness is related to the long charging time of EV. Another weakness related to the slow introduction of EVs concerns the availability of a charging infrastructure in which new facilities must be designed and integrated to existing road networks, and the capacity of the electricity grid on which EV charging may put a significant stress.
In order to cope with some weakness, several national and international initiatives are made for the success deployment of electric vehicles. For example, Transport and Tourism Committee of the European Commission voted on a directive to ensure that 456 000 charging stations should be made available to the public, in Europe, by 2020, with a target of 55000 charging stations in France. Furthermore, some services related to charging infrastructure such as mapping service of charging stations, roaming services of charging infrastructure are already proposed by several start-ups and companies. However, to ensure a successful deployment of electric vehicles in the short-term, it is significant to target development towards (1) specific usage categories where the electric vehicle is the most suitable (e.g. urban transport, urban logistic, business fleet) in terms of the driving range , charge capacity, and operating cost , and (2) manage operations of a complex landscape of ecosystem of EVs (vehicles - chargers - electricity grid - fleet management) with focusing on the new optimization challenges aiming to develop efficient models and decision tools to manage the ecosystem of EVs.
In this project we will focus on the second target objective of managing operations of business fleet in the context of urban logistic. Starting from real case studies of charging and routing with electric vehicles in urban logistic, we will develop models, optimization methods and decision tools that manage the landscape of the ecosystem of electric vehicle at tactical and operational level and allow business fleet managers to achieve economic equilibrium of electric vehicles fleet.