Service network design for electric vehicles with combined battery swapping and recharging

Incorporating both battery swapping and recharging strategies within electric vehicle (EV) service networks provides a flexible means of mitigating range limitations. While jointly optimizing these strategies poses significant modeling and computational challenges, it also yields valuable insights into their relative operational performance. We develop an optimization framework that jointly determines service network design, EV routing decisions, and the scheduling of recharging and battery swapping operations, while respecting capacity constraints on both activities. This study establishes a unified mixed-integer programming framework for EV service network design that integrates the two replenishment strategies under system-wide capacity limitations. To handle large-scale instances efficiently, we employ a column generation scheme, in which the pricing subproblem is solved using a bidirectional labeling algorithm supported by tailored dominance rules and problem-specific resource extension functions. In addition, a dedicated heuristic is designed to construct high-quality integer solutions. Computational experiments based on real-world case studies show that when both strategies are available, battery swapping tends to outperform recharging due to its shorter service time, highlighting the scalability and practical relevance of the proposed approach.