A note on battery swapping policies in the electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and battery swapping vehicles

Abstract

Çatay and Sadati [An improved matheuristic for solving the electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and synchronized mobile charging/battery swapping. Computers & Operations Research 159, 106310, 2023] explores a variant of the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows that incorporates mobile chargers for recharging electric vehicles (EVs) at selected locations while serving customers. The authors propose a matheuristic method to address this problem and its special case, where EV batteries are swapped in constant time instead of being recharged over variable durations. While comparing their results with those in the literature, the authors overlook a critical assumption regarding the swapping policy, potentially causing confusion in interpreting the findings. This note addresses the issue, clarifies the overlooked assumption, and updates the results that do not align with the actual scenario in the literature. Furthermore, it introduces two new battery swapping policies and presents an extensive computational study to offer new insights on synchronized mobile battery swapping