Strategic planning of electric logistics fleet networks: A robust location-routing approach

We present a robust location-routing approach that considers simultaneous decisions on routing vehicles and locating charging stations for strategic network design of electric logistics fleets. In this approach, we consider uncertain customer patterns with respect to the spatial customer distribution, demand, and service time windows. To solve large-sized instances as well as instances considering a high number of scenarios, a (parallelized) adaptive large neighbourhood search is presented. We derive new benchmark instances for the proposed problem class with different degrees of uncertainty and evaluate the performance of our algorithm. Results are presented for a real-world application case and are compared to results of different deterministic modeling approaches. Based on these results, the benefit of a robust planning approach with regard to operational feasibility and savings in overall costs is analyzed for the underlying planning problem, and managerial insights are derived. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.