  The main goal of this paper is to time-effectively route and schedule a fleet
of Electric Vehicles (EVs) on a road network in order to serve a set of
customers. In particular, we aim to propose an optimized route planning by
exploiting the advantages of these vehicles. Nowadays, in fact, electromobility
plays a key role for reducing the harmful emissions due, instead, to the use of
traditional vehicles. The starting point of this research is represented by the
fact that the advanced recent technologies for the EVs allow also partially
recharging their batteries. In this work, an Electric Vehicle Routing Problem
with Time Windows (E-VRPTW) is addressed from a time effective point of view
under the assumption that partial recharges are also allowed. For this purpose,
the E-VRPTW is mathematically formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program in
which both the total number of EVs used and the total time spent by them
outside the depot are minimized. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, a
Variable Neighborhood Search Branching (VNSB) matheuristic is also designed for
determining good quality solutions in reasonable computational times. Numerical
results carried out on some benchmark instances taken from the literature
provide useful insights regarding both the solution quality of the proposed
formulation, compared to a previous one, and the performances of the VNSB.
