VEHICLE FLEET PLANNING IN THE ROAD TRANSPORTATION INDUSTRY

Planning the composition of a vehicle fleet in order to satisfy transportation service demands is an important resource management activity for any trucking company. Its complexity is such, however, that formal fleet management cannot be done adequately without the help of a decision support system. An important part of such a system is the generation of minimal discounted cost plans covering the purchase, replacement, sale, and/or rental of the vehicles necessary to deal with a seasonal stochastic demand. In the present work, a stochastic programming model is formulated to address this problem. It reduces to a separable program based on information about the service demand, the state of the current fleet, and the cash flows generated by an acquisition/disposal plan. An efficient algorithm for solving the model is also presented. The discussion concerns the operations of a number of Canadian road carriers.