Vehicle Routing Problem for Cargo Bikes

Vehicle routing means planning the delivery tours of a fleet: which customers each vehicle visits, and in which order. In real life, routes must also follow business rules, such as delivery time slots, vehicle limits and how goods can be loaded, to be useful in practice.

Route optimization for cargo bike delivery

This feasibility study is funded by an Innosuisse Innovation Cheque and carried out by CLES with Shematic, a company that designs and builds electric cargo bikes under the YakBike brand. Cargo bikes are very different from delivery trucks: they have a limited battery range, can carry much less weight, and ride more slowly when fully loaded. Deliveries also come with business rules: time slots, the order of pickups and deliveries, and parcels that cannot be loaded together, for example a heavy parcel on top of a fragile one in the bike’s single cargo box. Today’s route planning tools were designed for trucks and do not handle these constraints. The project models the problem as a Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PDPTW) that combines both types of constraints. The goal is to test whether this model can be solved fast enough for daily use.

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