Toward Efficient Transportation Electrification of Heavy-Duty Trucks: Joint Scheduling of Truck Routing and Charging

The timely transportation of goods to customers is an essential component of economic activities. However, heavy-duty diesel trucks used for goods delivery significantly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions within many large metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. To reduce GHG emissions by facilitating freight electrification, this paper proposes Joint Routing and Charging scheduling for electric trucks. The objective of the associated optimization problem is to minimize the cost of transportation, charging, and tardiness. A large number of possible combinations of road segments as well as a large number of combinations of charging decisions and charging durations leads to a combinatorial explosion in the possible decisions electric trucks can make. The resulting mixed-integer linear programming problem is thus extremely challenging because of the combinatorial complexity even in the deterministic case. Therefore, a Surrogate Level-Based Lagrangian Relaxation (SLBLR) method is employed to decompose the overall problem into significantly less complex truck subproblems. In the coordination aspect, each truck subproblem is solved independently of other subproblems based on the values of Lagrangian multipliers. In addition to serving as a means of guiding and coordinating trucks, multipliers can also serve as a basis for transparent and explanatory decision-making by trucks. Testing results demonstrate that even small instances cannot be solved using the off-the-shelf solver CPLEX after several days of solving. The SLBLR method, on the other hand, can obtain near-optimal solutions within a few minutes for small cases, and within 30 minutes for large ones. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that as battery capacity increases, the total cost decreases significantly; moreover, as the charging power increases, the number of trucks required decreases as well.