Electric truck routing with charging queues
Electric trucks are entering freight fleets, and routing them is a growing problem in operations research. But most models assume a charger is free when the truck arrives; only 5 of 66 recent papers on electric-vehicle routing and charging carry a queue, waiting or congestion keyword. How much do charging queues change routes, fleet size and costs?
What prompted this#
Since October 2025, 66 papers carry an electric-vehicle-routing, electric-truck, charging-station or charging-scheduling keyword (42 in operations research journals); only 5 of them carry a queue, waiting-time or congestion keyword. Vehicle routing is one of the most frequent keywords of the year in the operations research journals.
Questions#
- When chargers are shared and queues form at busy times, how much longer and costlier do the best routes get?
- Is it cheaper to reserve charging slots, add battery capacity or build depot chargers?
- How do hourly electricity prices change when trucks should charge?
Possible approach#
Add random queues at public chargers to a standard electric vehicle routing model with time windows, and solve it on benchmark instances with realistic numbers of chargers.
Next step#
Extend an electric vehicle routing benchmark with charging queues drawn from observed station occupancy, and compare the plans made with and without queues.