Trailer fleet planning for industrial gas distribution

Yazhe Feng, Kimberly P. Ellis and Charlie W. Crawford

IISE Transactions, 2014, vol. 46, issue 12, 1329-1342

Abstract: For industrial gas providers, fleet planning is important to their financial and operational performance. This article considers long-term vehicle purchase decisions, medium-term vehicle relocation decisions, and short-term rental decisions that are useful for increasing flexibility to meet time-varying demand. A mixed-integer programming model is developed to minimize total distribution costs and fleet investment costs over multiple time periods and multiple depots. To solve the industrial-sized problem efficiently, a two-phase approach is proposed. In Phase I, routes are generated to capture the characteristics of typical gas delivery operations. A reduced model is solved to select routes for meeting customer demands, estimate distribution costs, and determine the preferred fleet size. Phase II addresses the trailer purchase, relocation, and rental decisions based on the outputs of Phase I. The numerical studies, conducted using a data set from a leading industrial gas company, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the decomposition approach. Different routing algorithms are compared to evaluate the impact of candidate routes. When compared with the integrated optimization model, the two-phase approach obtains quality solutions within reasonable computational time.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0740817X.2014.905737 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:uiiexx:v:46:y:2014:i:12:p:1329-1342

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/uiie20

DOI: 10.1080/0740817X.2014.905737

Access Statistics for this article

IISE Transactions is currently edited by Jianjun Shi

More articles in IISE Transactions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().