Energy-Constrained Electric Vehicle Fleet Routing with Charging Station Insertion Using Metaheuristic Optimization

Abstract

The rapid transition toward sustainable electrified transportation has led to the urgent deployment of electric vehicle (EV) fleets in urban logistics, where limited battery capacity and the need for en-route charging introduce new challenges for EV routing optimization. The final route, travel time, and operational cost are directly affected by the inclusion of charging stations in the routing objective. Unlike conventional vehicle routing problems (VRPs), the electric VRP (EVRP) requires energy feasibility constraints to be tightly integrated with routing decisions. In this study, we introduce a scalable, simulation-based EVRP framework that explicitly incorporates charging-station insertion into a metaheuristic optimization solver. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach is adopted to address the combinatorial complexity of large-scale instances, while feasibility is enforced through state-of-charge tracking and adaptive charging decisions. The proposed framework is evaluated and compared with a heuristic baseline algorithm (BR-TSP) under multiple simulation scenarios. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach is fully feasible across all tested scenarios, significantly outperforms classical exact solvers in scalability, and highlights the critical role of explicit charging integration in realistic EV fleet operations. The findings reveal practical strategies for energy-aware routing in large-scale electric mobility applications.