Article ID: | iaor20072489 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 42 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 272 |
End Page Number: | 292 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2006 |
Journal: | Transportation Research. Part E, Logistics and Transportation Review |
Authors: | Fink Andreas, Reiners Torsten |
Keywords: | allocation: resources, networks: flow |
Logistics management in the car rental business involves short-term decisions about the transportation and deployment of cars with regard to optimizing fleet utilization while maintaining a high service level. We model and solve this problem by means of minimum cost network flow optimization under consideration of essential practical needs such as multi-period planning, a country-wide network, customized transportation relations, fleeting and defleeting, and car groups with partial substitutability. Experiments were conducted on substantial real-world data, using a simulation model to assess optimization results for different scenarios. The results indicate that the proposed approach can significantly improve efficiency.