Real-time Fleet Management System Research Articles

A policy of picking up parcels for express courier service in dynamic environments

As a particular logistics service, the express courier service has seen considerable growth recently, which resulted in an unprecedented fierce competition. Besides, the development of information and communication technologies has enabled express company to manage their service. With the purpose of improving service quality and operation efficiency for express company, we focus on the problem of intercity express courier routing in courier-triggered pickup service. A novel pickup policy for courier routing is proposed based on the idea of centrality measures and the nearest-neighbour (NN) policy by considering the un-serviced customer requests as a globally coupled network. This policy enables to dispatch the idle courier to the more central request location, which allows the courier to easily serve the neighbouring requests around the central request location, thus securing both global and local performance. We also propose a simple prototype of real-time fleet management system where the proposed pickup policy is embedded into it. To evaluate the efficiency and practicability of the pickup policy, we conduct comprehensive computational experiments to generate various testing scenarios; moreover, two widely used dispatching policies – NN and first-come-first-served (FCFS) – are considered as the benchmark policy. Results show that the proposed pickup policy significantly outperforms the NN and FCFS policies in terms of waiting time and total service time.

Real-time management of vehicle breakdowns in urban freight distribution

This paper considers a problem in which an unexpected event immobilises a vehicle of a distribution fleet permanently, and the remaining vehicles are rerouted to serve some of the clients of the failed vehicle. We model this case as a variation of the Team Orienteering Problem (TOP), constraining all vehicle routes to an upper time, or distance, limit, and taking into account the limited capacity of the fleet vehicles. The problem requires an effective solution in almost real time. We propose a new heuristic to provide efficient solutions within this strict computational time constraint. To test the quality of the heuristic, we have developed and validated a Genetic Algorithm (GA) that obtains high quality (but computationally expensive) solutions. The solutions of the heuristic compare favorably to those obtained by the GA. The latter has also been tested successfully in a real-time fleet management system.

Wireless technologies for logistic distribution process

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present the integration of logistic management with information and communication technologies to largely improve the effectiveness of logistic fleet operations. The work presented here shows a real‐world fleet management system that integrates mobile communication and supports real‐time logistic information flow management.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the application of information and mobile communication technologies in providing effective logistic distribution service is introduced. Then, the proposed real‐time fleet management system (RTFMS) architecture is depicted, the technology profiles for mobile data terminal (MDT) and logistic information system are described, and the considerations of various wireless mobile communication technologies for logistic distribution process are also addressed. Finally, the implications of this paper are discussed and plans for further work are outlined.FindingsThe proposed architecture for a real‐world logistic fleet management system, the RTFMS, can be served as reference architecture for real‐time logistic fleet management design. The major components of the RTFMS have been described in UML use cases to facilitate reuse of this design. This paper presents the RTFMS architecture with associated information flows and timing considerations could be used for the architecture adaptation in similar applications. Wireless technologies provide the logistics feet management with bi‐directional real‐time information flows as shown in this paper, and this would stimulate new ideas in logistics management and services models.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper provides a reference model with implementation in adopting wireless technologies in logistics distribution process. However, the services provided by each specific system would depend on all stakeholders in specific chain of logistics service provider and consumer.Originality/valueThe work presented here shows a real‐world fleet management system that integrates mobile communication and supports real‐time logistic information flow management.