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.