Economical-Traveling-Distance-Based Fleet Composition With Fuel Costs: An Application In Petrol Distribution

This paper addresses the operational fleet composition problem with fuel costs, which is a new variant of the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem. We first propose an economical traveling distance (ETD) approach to quantify the best traveling distance range for each vehicle type by using its fuel consumption rate. Then, an ETD-based algorithm is developed to investigate the strong dependency among fleet composition, routing and loading decisions. A case study of a large petrol distribution company in Dalian city and extensive computational results demonstrate the benefits of incorporating ETD into the fleet composition decision considering fuel costs.