A multi-compartment electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and temperature and humidity settings for perishable product delivery

Perishable product delivery has been a notable challenge due to the nature of perishability and high customer expectations. Recently, emerging technologies such as electric and multi-compartment vehicles have been applied to facilitate perishable product deliveries with less deterioration and carbon emissions. Accordingly, new management problems are placed including setting environmental conditions of compartments, routing and scheduling the recharging of vehicles. To deal with these difficulties, we introduce the multi-compartment electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and temperature and humidity settings (MCEVRP-th). A mathematical formulation is proposed, and a hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search and tabu search heuristic (ALNS/TS), which allows generating infeasible solutions, is developed. Extensive experiments assess the performance of the proposed algorithm based on the modified benchmark and real-world instances, and several management insights are derived.