Fleet management: A vehicle and driver assignment model

摘要

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. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.