Energy Estimation of Last Mile Electric Vehicle Routes

Abstract: Last-mile carriers increasingly incorporate electric vehicles (EVs) into their delivery fleet to achieve sustainability goals. This goal presents many challenges across multiple planning spaces including but not limited to how to plan EV routes. In this paper, we address the problem of predicting energy consumption of EVs for Last-Mile delivery routes using deep learning. We demonstrate the need to move away from thinking about range and we propose using energy as the basic unit of analysis. We share a range of deep learning solutions, beginning with a Feed Forward Neural Network (NN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and demonstrate significant accuracy improvements relative to pure physics-based and distance-based approaches. Finally, we present Route Energy Transformer (RET) a decoder-only Transformer model sized according to Chinchilla scaling laws. RET yields a +217 Basis Points (bps) improvement in Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) relative to the Feed Forward NN and a +105 bps improvement relative to the RNN.