To team up or not: single versus team driving in European road freight transport

Asvin Goel (), Thibaut Vidal () and Adrianus Leendert Kok ()
Additional contact information
Asvin Goel: Kühne Logistics University
Thibaut Vidal: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro
Adrianus Leendert Kok: ORTEC

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, 2021, vol. 33, issue 4, No 1, 879-913

Abstract: Abstract The last decades have seen a tremendous amount of research being devoted to effectively managing vehicle fleets and minimizing empty mileage. However, in contrast to, e.g., the air transport sector, the question of how to best assign crews to vehicles, has received very little attention in the road transport sector. The vast majority of road freight transport in Europe is conducted by single drivers and team driving is often only conducted if there are special circumstances, e.g., security concerns. While it is clear that transport companies want to avoid the costs related to additional drivers, vehicles manned by a single driver sit unused whenever the driver takes a mandatory break or rest. Team drivers, on the other hand, can travel a much greater distance in the same amount of time, because mandatory breaks and rests are required less frequently. This paper investigates under which conditions trucking companies should use single or team driving to maximize their profitability. We present a novel optimization approach for simultaneously optimizing routes and crewing decisions and provide experimental evidence that, for a wide range of cost factors, operating a fleet with a mix of team and single drivers can significantly reduce operational costs when compared to typical profit margins in the sector.

Keywords: Fleet management; Crewing; Vehicle routing; Scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10696-020-09398-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:flsman:v:33:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s10696-020-09398-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10696

DOI: 10.1007/s10696-020-09398-0

Access Statistics for this article

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal is currently edited by Hans Günther

More articles in Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().