Routing and charging of electric vehicles: Literature review

An electric vehicle, as the name suggests, runs purely on electricity provided by battery packs located under its floor. This electricity fuels the engine and converts electric power to mechanical motion. Accordingly, electric vehicles do not emit pollutants as no combustion process takes place within, making it an eco-friendly alternative to combustion vehicles. However, electric vehicles face one major issue and that is their limited range. Recharging electric vehicles’ batteries requires an important amount of time. Since time is an important factor, recent works started focusing more and more on optimizing the use of recharge within an electric vehicle to make the most of it while avoiding frequent stops at the charging stations. Another riddle to solve, is the routing of vehicles which gets more complicated when electric vehicles are thrown into the mix. Not only an electric vehicle has a limited range, adding charging stations location to the problem affects the final path, the time and the cost of the routing problem. To help researchers advance in this direction, our work discuss the recent methods used to solve the vehicle routing problem, as well as the issues facing charging of electric vehicles. This will help establish a picture of where improvements need to be made and inspire future works to accelerate the rate at which electric vehicles will be roaming our roads. Our review shows that literature focuses increasingly on adapting electric VRP to real life settings by adding more and more constraints. Moreover, recent works are considering the recharging patterns of electric vehicles in order to reduce the overall travel time, distance and cost. The results of this review prove that complexity of electric VRP stems from the difficulty of satisfying all imposed constraints, as well as the inability to predict the outcome of the solution proposed face to real-life scenarios.