Electric vehicle handling routing and battery swap station location optimisation for automotive assembly lines

As electric vehicles (EVs) have been more and more widely used recently, in this paper, an electric vehicle handling routing and battery swap station location problem (EV–HR–BSSL) is presented to extend their range of application, which aims to determine the handling routing plan of a fleet of EVs and the location decisions of battery swap stations (BSSs) simultaneously under limited battery driving range. A mathematical problem is developed to illustrate the identified problem, where a fleet of identical EVs are assumed to fulfil the demand of stations for automotive assembly lines based on in-plant milk run handling strategy. Subsequently, several definitions and properties are proposed to solve this model more efficiently. A two-phase dynamic programming method is adopted to obtain the global optimum for small scale problems. For medium and large scale problems, an improved discrete cuckoo search algorithm is developed. The performances are evaluated in simulation and the results indicate that the proposed algorithm is valid and feasible.