Fleet Profile: Using visual analytics to prospect logistic solutions in industrial vehicles fleet

Abstract

Fleet planning and management activities are essential to establish the quantity and type of vehicles needed to pursue production plans and reduce costs. In steel companies, logistic analysts are responsible for these fleet activities. However, analysts still face challenges assessing fleet utilization due to the volume and form in which the data is found. Normally, this type of problem is out of the scope of fleet planning models in the literature. For information extraction from massive and complex databases, visual analytics is an alternative that employs data analysis and visualization techniques. This research investigates visual analytics to support industrial vehicle fleet management. As a result, two artifacts were developed: a fleet measurement model and Fleet Profile, a visual analytics solution. Two research cycles, each one producing a Fleet Profile version that was evaluated with real cases after the development. Findings from the analysis of the evaluation contents indicated that the Fleet Profile’s visual description could help to evaluate fleet utilization and identify gaps for fleet optimization.