Determination of vehicle fleet size for container shuttle service

This paper presents two analytical approaches to determine the vehicle fleet size for container shuttle service. The shuttle service can be defined as the repetitive travel between the designated places during working period. In the first approach, the transportation model is adopted in order to determine the number of vehicles required. Its advantages and disadvantages in practical application are also discussed. In the second approach, a logical network which is oriented on job is transformed from a physical network which is focused on demand site. Nodes on the logical network represent jobs which include loaded travel, loading and unloading and arcs represent empty travel for the next job. Then a mathematical formulation is constructed similar to the multiple traveling salesman problem (TSP). A solution procedure is carried out based on the well-known insertion heuristic with the real world data.