Integrated vehicle fleet-sizing, leasing and dispatching policy in a shuttle service system

摘要

In this paper, we aim to develop an integrated Markov model for fleet management decisions such as fleet sizing, vehicle leasing, loaded vehicle dispatching and empty vehicle repositioning in a two-terminal shuttle service, where vehicles are moving between terminals to satisfy random customer demands. The problem is approached in two stages. In the first stage, the optimal vehicle dispatching policy (including vehicle leasing) is derived with fixed fleet size. In the second stage, the fleet size is optimised. The model provides a framework to examine the detailed control structure of the optimal vehicle dispatching policy, which can lead to much simpler near-optimal policies that are easy to interpret and implement for terminal managers. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the results.