Agent-Based Regional Delivery Model for Optimising Electric Commercial Vehicle Concepts

Heavy-duty battery electric commercial vehicles may be limited to short routes without a secondary power source. Therefore, concepts for commercial vehicles with fuel cell range extenders have been proposed. This paper presents an agent-based supply chain GIS model developed to simulate urban and regional freight distribution employing fleets of electric trucks equipped with fuel cell range extenders. The model was implemented in AnyLogic to simulate the transport of goods from regional distributors to urban stores. It solves a vehicle routing problem and identifies optimised routes by running a simulated annealing algorithm complemented by several heuristic methods. This model was used to optimise vehicle concepts for a particular freight distribution task. A reduction in battery capacity minimised costs directly related to the vehicles, whereas an increase in both battery and load capacity minimised fleet size. Additional power generation in the range extenders compensated for the reduction of battery capacity.