Solving the battery swap station location-routing problem with capacitated electric vehicles using an AVNS algorithm for vehicle-routing problems with intermediate stops

•We show how to extend an AVNS for the VRPIS to address the BSS-EV-LRP.•The extended AVNS is able to significantly improve previous results from the literature.•The AVNS is robust showing small differences between average and best solution quality on the established instances.•The AVNS strongly reduces the number of BSSs used in a solution compared to previous results.•Therefore, we introduce additional benchmark instances which prove to be more meaningful with regard to the necessity of using BSSs.