Minimizing operations costs for a container road carrier

In this preliminary work, a fleet management problem that occurs in container transportation industry is presented. From the carrier perspective, the present and future operations 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 expected by the shippers that own the containers). Our solution approach is based on the relaxation of this problem in three separate simpler sub–problems associated to each of the costs considered above.