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The battery electric truck (BET) has emerged as a promising solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in urban logistics, given the current strict environmental regulations. This research explores the formulation and solution of the bi-objective BET dispatching problem with backhauls and time windows, aiming to simultaneously reduce environmental impacts and enhance the efficiency of urban logistics. From the sustainability perspective, one of the objectives is to minimize total energy costs, which include energy consumption and battery replacement expenses. On the other hand, from an economic perspective, the other objective is the minimization of labor costs. To solve this bi-objective BET dispatching problem, we propose an innovative approach, integrating an adaptive large neighborhood search-based metaheuristics algorithm with a multi-objective optimization strategy. This integration enables the exploration of the trade-off between fleet energy expenses and labor costs, optimizing the dispatching decisions for BETs. To validate the proposed dispatching strategy, extensive experiments were conducted using real-world fleet operations data from a logistics fleet in Southern California. The results demonstrated that the proposed approach yields a set of Pareto solutions, showcasing its effectiveness in finding a balance between energy efficiency and labor costs in urban logistics systems. The findings of this research contribute to advancing sustainable urban logistics practices and provide valuable insights for fleet operators in effectively managing BET fleets to reduce environmental impacts while maintaining economic efficiency.
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Energy-Efficient Dispatching of Battery Electric Truck Fleets with Backhauls and Time Windows
The adoption of battery electric trucks (BETs) as a replacement for diesel trucks has potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the freight transportation sector. However, BETs have shorter driving range and lower payload capacity, which need to be taken into account when dispatching them. This article addresses the energy-efficient dispatching of BET fleets, considering backhauls and time windows. To optimize vehicle utilization, customers are categorized into two groups: linehaul customers requiring deliveries, where the deliveries need to be made following the last-in-first-out principle, and backhaul customers requiring pickups. The objective is to determine a set of energy-efficient routes that integrate both linehaul and backhaul customers while considering factors such as limited driving range, payload capacity of BETs, and the possibility of en route recharging. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear programming model and propose an algorithm that combines adaptive large neighborhood search and simulated annealing metaheuristics to solve it. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated through extensive experiments using a real-world case study from a logistics company in Southern California. The results indicate that the proposed strategy leads to a significant reduction in total energy consumption compared to the baseline strategy, ranging from 11% to 40%, while maintaining reasonable computational time. In addition, the proposed strategy provides solutions that are better than or comparable with those obtained by other metaheuristics. This research contributes to the development of sustainable transportation solutions in the freight sector by providing a novel approach for dispatching BET fleets. The findings emphasize the potential of deploying BETs to achieve energy savings and advance the goal of green logistics.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2152258
- PAR ID:
- 10510618
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAE International
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SAE International Journal of Electrified Vehicles
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2691-3747
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Efforts to decarbonize the heavy-duty vehicle sector have generated vast interest in transitioning from conventional diesel trucks to battery electric trucks (BETs). As a result, understanding energy consumption characteristics of BETs has become important for a variety of applications, for instance, assessing the feasibility of deploying BETs in place of conventional diesel trucks, predicting the state-of-charge (SOC) of BETs after specific duty cycles, and managing BET charging needs at the home base or en-route. For these applications, mesoscopic energy consumption models offer a good balance between the amount and fidelity of the input data needed, such as average traffic speed and road grade on a link-by-link basis, and the model performance. As a common intelligent transportation system (ITS) application, this paper presents a comparative assessment of mesoscopic energy consumption models for BETs developed using three different machine learning techniques. The results show that the random forest (RF) regression outperforms the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM), as well as the conventional linear regression as evidenced by the resulting model having a higher coefficient of determination (R2) value than that of its counterparts. When applied to the simulated dataset, the RF regression can capture the behaviors of BET energy consumption well where the R2 value of the resulting model is 0.94.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.4271/14-13-01-0009
