Bi-Level Fleet Dispatching Strategy for Battery-Electric Trucks: A Real-World Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors addressed the topic of battery-electric trucks, evaluating their actual implementation in a real-world case study towards sustainable urban transportation. 

Some comments are provided below.

1) I found the conclusion and discussion section very poor. It seems more just a conclusion without a comparison with the exiting literature.

2) the main findings of your research should be better highlighted.

3) the authors evaluated how their proposed strategy may save travel distance and time. Did the authors also consider the impact on road safety of this strategy? Trucks are a well-known issue affecting the safety of several road users (i.e., pedestrians,   https://doi.org/10.1080/17457300.2022.2116647, but also cyclists,https://doi.org/10.1186/s12544-019-0371-7, and motorcyclists). I think the authors should at least cite the presence of a safety drawback as a potential limitation of the strategy implementation that should be further investigated.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents an interesting approach to electric truck routing problem, which specifically adopts a bi-level strategy mimicking human decision on complex problems. 

The following issues may be considered for further improvements.

1) In the top level of zone partitioning, k-means is used.  In deciding how many pickup-dropoff locations one zone can have, a heuristic value of 20 is given.  I guess this number comes from the real experience of the case study. If possible, more details can be added on how to decide one partition strategy meets the requirement or not. 

2) The bi-level strategy actually disintegrates or decouples such a complex problem into two consecutive sub-problems. But is there some case when such decoupling may not work, or two sub-problems can not guarantee a real optimal solution? It is suggested to add more explanations on this issue. 

3) It is understandable that a constant energy consumption rate is assumed in this study, i.e. 2.14kWh/mile. If the payload adds gradually, the consumption goes higher. In real applications, how can such concerns be cleared? Can the problem formulation be extended to consider this issue?

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I can't find the comments that the authors said they have added to the text. Page 14 has no line 386, and even at line 386 there are no added comments. the same occurred for comments at point 2.

Regarding the point 3, the issue should be pointed out in the discussion. Please, highlight why trucks are a safety concern for vulnerable road users using updated references (the authors may draw inspiration from the following https://doi.org/10.1080/17457300.2022.2116647,  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12544-019-0371-7) and clarify that your strategy is in line with the safety goals of 2030 Agenda.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for taking into account my comments