Incorporating vehicle routeing into the vehicle fleet composition problem

An efficient heuristic for determining the composition of a vehicle fleet is developed which considers delivery routes whilst evaluating fleet jixes. The aim is to include a perturbation procedure within existing or constructed routes to reduce the total cost of routeing and acquisition by improving the utilisation of the vehicles. This approach has been tested on twenty problems given in the literature and new best results are reported here. An extensive literature review is also given.