Developing an Efficient Dispatching Strategy to Support Commercial Fleet Electrification

Driven by new policies and regulations concerning emissions of greenhouse gases from the transportation sector, battery-electric trucks (BETs) are considered one of the promising solutions to sustainable freight transportation. However, due to their constraints of vehicle range and charging time, BET fleet operations (e.g., dispatching, scheduling, routing) will need to be radically changed compared to a regular (diesel-powered) truck fleets. This project will address the dispatching problem of a generalized BET fleet, in the form of an (electric) vehicle routing problem (VRP) with pick-up and delivery windows. Since the BET fleet dispatching problem is sufficiently complex, existing approaches are not solvable for large fleets in a computation ally efficient manner. To overcome these limitations, the researchers propose a hierarchical strategy, which incorporates dispatching zone partitioning (at a high level) and metaheuristics-based vehicle scheduling/routing to optimize the itineraries of the BET fleet (at the lower level) in terms of operational costs. The proposed algorithm considers the fleet size, variations in the BET’s all electric range, the BET’s cargo capacity, availability of charging facilities/capabilities, and pickup/drop-off sequence. Furthermore, the researchers will apply the proposed strategy to real-world fleet dispatching scenarios and compare its performance with the baseline strategies deployed by the logistics company.

• Record URL:
  https://ncst.ucdavis.edu/project/developing-efficient-dispatching-strategy-support-commercial-fleet-electrification

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Funding: $90000
• Contract Numbers:

  DOT 69A3551747114

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590

  National Center for Sustainable Transportation

  University of California, Davis
  Davis, CA  United States 
• Managing Organizations:

  National Center for Sustainable Transportation

  University of California, Davis
  Davis, CA  United States 

  University of California, Riverside

  1084 Columbia Ave.
  Riverside, CA  United States  92507
• Project Managers:

  Iacobucci, Lauren

• Performing Organizations:

  National Center for Sustainable Transportation

  University of California, Davis
  Davis, CA  United States 

  University of California, Riverside

  1084 Columbia Ave.
  Riverside, CA  United States  92507
• Principal Investigators:

  Wu, Guoyuan

  Boriboonsomsin, Kanok

• Start Date: 20220701
• Expected Completion Date: 20230630
• Actual Completion Date: 20240221
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Commercial vehicles; Dispatching; Electric trucks; Fleet management; Optimization; Routing; Sustainable transportation; Vehicle fleets
• Subject Areas: Energy; Environment; Freight Transportation; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01855104
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: National Center for Sustainable Transportation
• Contract Numbers: DOT 69A3551747114
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Aug 19 2022 3:49PM