Variable Neighborhood Descent Branching Applied to the Green Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window and Mixed Fleet

This paper deals with the Green Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window and Mixed Fleet and presents a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation for it. Initially, we applied the CPLEX solver in this formulation. Then, to reduce the computational time, we used Local Branching and Variable Neighborhood Descent Branching (VNDB) methods. We did computational experiments with a simple adaptation of the 100-customers Solomon’s benchmark instances. The results showed that the three solution strategies reached the optimal solution. However, the running time of the VNDB is considerably smaller than those required by the other two solution methods. Therefore, this fact proves that the VNDB is the more efficient technique in the tested scenario.