Fleet management: A vehicle and driver assignment model

Filipe Monnerat, Joana Dias and Maria João Alves

European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 278, issue 1, 64-75

Abstract: Many institutions have their own vehicle fleet and hired drivers that can be assigned to working trips to ensure that they all take place within the desired time periods. In these situations, it is important that vehicles and drivers are assigned to planned trips in an optimal and automated way. Trips are planned to occur over a given planning horizon and have a number of characteristics that have to be taken into account: a trip is characterized by a starting time, start and end locations, travelling distance and time, number of drivers needed for each assigned vehicle, number of passengers, and so on. This paper considers the problem of assigning both vehicles and drivers to a set of planned trips, having as objective the minimization of total cost. To properly address this problem it is necessary to consider a number of features, like the possibility of vehicles being shared between different trips if the timeframes and destinations are compatible. The mathematical model developed and presented in this paper takes all these features into account. The problem was motivated by a case study in the context of a public Brazilian university. This case study is also described and computational experiments using a general solver are reported. The general solver is capable of calculating optimal solutions in reasonable computational times, but problems where the fleet is mainly composed of small vehicles are more challenging. A matheuristic has been developed and tested, that seems to be competitive for these type of problems.

Keywords: Combinatorial optimization; Generalized Assignment Problem; Fleet management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221719302607
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:278:y:2019:i:1:p:64-75

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2019.03.021

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().