Electric Vehicle Charge Scheduling with Flexible Service Operations.

The article focuses on the joint scheduling problem of charging and service operations for large fleets of electric commercial vehicles (ECVs), considering limited charging infrastructure capacity, nonlinear battery charging behavior, battery degradation, and time-of-use (TOU) energy tariffs. It proposes an exact branch-and-price (B&P) algorithm featuring a novel labeling method with efficient dominance rules, a primal heuristic, and a problem-specific branching rule to solve realistic-sized instances within practical computational times. Computational experiments demonstrate that the algorithm outperforms mixed-integer programming solvers and scales well to large fleets and extended planning horizons. Managerial insights reveal that integrated scheduling can reduce required charging infrastructure by up to 57% and operational costs by up to 5%, with greater benefits arising from flexible service operations and highly variable energy prices. The study highlights the trade-off between battery degradation costs and energy prices and suggests that integrated planning is most advantageous under scenarios with significant energy price variability.