Minimizing fleet operating costs for a container transportation company

This paper focuses on a fleet management problem that arises in container trucking industry. From the container transportation company perspective, the present and future operating costs to minimize can be divided in three components: the routing costs, the resource (i.e., driver and truck) assignment costs and the container repositioning costs (i.e., the costs of restoring a given container fleet distribution over the serviced territory,.as requested by the shippers that own the containers). This real-world problem has been modeled as an integer programming problem. The proposed solution approach is based on the decomposition of this problem in three simpler sub-problems associated to each of the costs considered above. Numerical experiments on randomly generated instances, as well as on a real-world data set of an Italian container trucking company, are presented. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.