Collaborative platooning and routing for mixed fleets of electric automated vehicles and conventional trucks

Abstract

The application of automated ground vehicles (AGVs) is well-established in closed environments such as port terminals, while their operation in open areas remains challenging. In this work, we set out to overcome this limitation by introducing platooning as a transfer mode in heterogeneous vehicle networks. We propose a collaborative transportation framework where different transportation companies use a shared platform for delivery tasks. To support decarbonization efforts in port hinterland transport, we consider fleets comprising electric AGVs (E-AGVs) and conventional trucks. These E-AGVs need to visit charging stations, modeled as battery swap stations (BSS), and join platoons to travel within the linking road segment. Each carrier has contracts with certain BSSs and shares these stations through the platform as part of the transportation plan. The platform functions as a demand and resource pooling mechanism, further offering platooning and infrastructure-sharing services. We model the interaction between the platform and carriers as a two-level constrained Stackelberg competition. An efficient solution algorithm, incorporating problem-specific heuristics and an adaptive large neighborhood search with dedicated destroy, repair, and intensification operators, is proposed. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the algorithm's performance on both existing and new benchmark instances. Our results highlight the platform's potential to streamline port-hinterland logistics, with E-AGV platoons significantly reducing costs and emissions.