Joint Routing and Charging Heuristics for Electric Urban Delivery Vehicles Under Time-of-Use Electricity Pricing: A Shenzhen-Inspired Case Study

Abstract

Electric urban delivery vehicles must coordinate customer visits with limited battery energy, charging time, and electricity prices that vary during the day. This paper develops a reproducible Shenzhen-inspired single-vehicle case study for routing and charging decisions under customer time windows and time-of-use (TOU) electricity pricing. The semi-synthetic instance contains one depot, 12 customers, five public charging stations, departure-time-dependent travel speeds, and a safety state-of-charge (SOC) threshold. A time-window-aware route construction and 2-opt improvement procedure are combined with a rule-based charging policy that selects a reachable station and a partial charging target according to remaining energy requirements and the current tariff. Six controlled scenarios separate the effects of fixed versus TOU pricing, full versus smart charging, and a distance-oriented baseline route versus the joint heuristic route. All scenarios serve every customer without lateness and preserve the 10 kWh SOC reserve. Under TOU pricing, smart charging reduces total operating cost by 9.73% relative to full charging. Holding smart charging constant, the joint heuristic further reduces cost by 11.72%. The lowest-cost scenario, TOU pricing with the joint heuristic, costs 564.07 RMB, 20.30% below the TOU full-charge baseline. The results show that partial charging and service-order design account for most savings, while the isolated TOU effect is approximately 3%-4% in this instance. The work provides a transparent experimental prototype rather than a claim of globally optimal routing or a validation on real enterprise orders.