A review of fleet planning problems in single and multimodal transportation systems

ABSTRACT

This paper mainly evaluates the previously published fleet planning researches which primarily utilize operations research and computational intelligence based techniques. An intermodal fleet planning framework with a classification scheme is also proposed by considering different problem/modeling characteristics, decision-making levels and multiple players or decision makers. Majority of the papers in this field generally focused on single mode fleet planning problems from the viewpoint of a single decision maker. However, there is a limited number of studies on intermodal fleet planning with multiple transport modes and resources. On the other hand, there is a strong interaction among the fleet planning components such as fleet sizing/composition, fleet deployment, fleet inventory control, empty vehicle repositioning problems etc. Nevertheless, these problems are mostly modeled and solved in a separated way in the available literature. Evaluation of the previous fleet planning researches enabled us to identify gaps in the literature and comment on the directions for future works which can lead to develop expert systems/decision support systems in the context of Logistics 4.0 for the integrated fleet planning problems with sustainability objectives under uncertain environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Fleet planning
• fleet sizing
• fleet composition
• fleet deployment
• intermodal transportation
• empty vehicle repositioning

Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by Ministry of Science, Industry & Technology of Turkey in the scope of SAN-TEZ project No: 0617.STZ.2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is supported by Ministry of Industry and Technology of Turkey in the scope of SANTEZ project No 0617.STZ.2014.