On the coordination of maintenance scheduling for transportation fleets of many branches of a logistic service provider

In this paper, we study the Transportation Fleet Maintenance Scheduling Problem (TFMSP) for a Logistic Service Provider (LSP) with many sub-companies (or branches). In the literature, Goyal and Gunasekaran’s [S.K. Goyal, A. Gunasekaran, determining economic maintenance frequency of a transportation fleet, International Journal of Systems Science 23 (4) (1992) 655–659] presented a mathematical model for the TFMSP to determine the economic maintenance frequency of only a single company. However, an LSP usually owns many branches that serve for the operations of transshipments of different areas of a country in most real cases. There exists significant room to reduce average total costs for an LSP if managers coordinate economic maintenance frequencies among branches. Therefore, we were motivated to propose an extended model of the TFMSP with many branches in this study. In order to solve this problem, we first conduct a full analysis on the extended model. By utilizing our theoretical results, we propose an efficient search algorithm that effectively solves an optimal solution for the extended TFMSP. Our numerical results show that the whole transportation fleet system of an LSP can obtain significant cost savings from the coordination policy.