Zeimpekis V., Tarantilis C.D., Giaglis G.M., Minis I. (eds.) Dynamic Fleet Management. Concepts, Systems, Algorithms & Case Studies

Springer, 2007. — 249.The challenges of contemporary fleet management are moving beyond cost efficiency towards superior customer service, agility, and responsiveness to requirements that vary at a time scale unthinkable even a decade ago. Over the last forty years classical methods of fleet management have addressed extensively the issue of cost efficiency by developing a priori routing plans in a wide spectrum of practical problems. However, the use of an initial plan, although necessary, is by no means sufficient to address events that are likely to occur during plan execution and significantly affect system performance. Typical examples of such evens are customer orders that arrive in real time and should be served by vehicles already on route, as well as disturbances intrinsic to urban environments, such as traffic delays, parking unavailability, and breakdowns. The ability to deal with such cases in a satisfactory manner is increasingly important to the competitiveness of logistics and transport related operations.
Dynamic fleet management refers to environments in which information is dynamically revealed to the decision maker. This information may not be known at the initial planning stage, and/or may change after the construction of the initial fleet routes during plan execution. In addition, there are significant cases in which no routing exists and the system responds to requests that arrive dynamically.
Methods that address the critical issues of dynamic fleet management may be implemented in practical systems by taking advantage of recent advances in satellite and mobile communication technologies. Specifically, satellite location identification systems that use the Global Positioning System (GPS) and terrestrial mobile communication systems, such as the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) or Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), enable fleet operators to monitor the execution of a plan and to manage operations in real time, thus improving fleet performance.
This edited volume aims to highlight important advances in the emerging field of Dynamic Fleet Management. The fundamental problem of real time vehicle routing is defined and solution methods are presented and classified. Emphasis is also given to algorithmic approaches that are able to process dynamic information and produce solutions of acceptable quality for significant dynamic fleet management problems in almost real time. Finally, the volume includes case studies that address actual dynamic problems by combining systemic and algorithmic approaches.Planned route optimization for real-time vehicle routing
Classification of dynamic vehicle routing systems
Dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing in practice
A parallelizable and approximate dynamic programming-based dynamic fleet management model with random travel times and multiple vehicle types
Integrated model for the dynamic on-demand air transportation operations
An intermodal time-dependent minimum cost path algorithm
Real-time emergency response fleet deployment: concepts, systems, simulation & case studies
Vehicle routing and scheduling models, simulation and city logistics
Dynamic management of a delayed delivery vehicle in a city logistics environment
Real-time fleet management at eCourier Ltd