---
title: "Electric truck routing with charging queues"
description: "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?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/electric-truck-routing-with-charging-queues
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/electric-truck-routing-with-charging-queues.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Electric truck routing with charging queues: Electric trucks are entering freight fleets, and routing them is a growing problem in operations research."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["operations research", "logistics", "energy"]
keywords: ["electric vehicle routing problem", "charging stations", "electric trucks"]
---

# 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](/categories/operations-research).

## 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.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| electric vehicle routing problem | 0 | – | 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 3, 0, 3, 2, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0 | 30 |
| charging stations | 0 | – | 3, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1, 0, 2, 3, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0 | 36 |
| electric trucks | 2 | #1303 | 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 2 | 14 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Electric truck routing with charging queues. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/electric-truck-routing-with-charging-queues

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-electric-truck-routing-with-charging-queues,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Electric truck routing with charging queues},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/electric-truck-routing-with-charging-queues}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).