Route Planning of Battery Electric Heavy-Duty Commercial Vehicles : Using Contraction Hierarchies and Mixed Integer Programming

Abstract: This thesis addresses route planning of Battery Electric Heavy-Duty Commercial Vehicles to enhance the reliability of electric vehicle transport. Collaborating with Scania, a Swedish truck manufacturing company, the goal is to develop a pipeline that uses open source data from OpenStreetMap and performs a modified Contraction Hierarchy in order to create a graph that can be used as input to a modified Vehicle Routing Problem formulation using Mixed Integer Programming. The input graph is preprocessed to support a Battery Electric Heavy-Duty Commercial Vehicle model in order to more accurately predict energy consumption. The challenges lie in balancing computational efficiency and electric vehicle characteristics. The implemented pipeline demonstrates success but initial tests show that a naive version of the pipeline, not implementing Contraction Hierarchies, can perform better. Several speedups can be made in order to improve the efficiency of the pipeline, the main being in programming in a more efficient programming language than Python. Further testing is needed for larger input graphs to assess performance accurately.