Breakout Session 

Dynamic Optimisation – Vehicles, Routes and People

Optimisation can be an overused and confusing term. In our world, we consider optimisation to be about decisions that relate to: 

• Compliance with rules and regulations (for example, maximum vehicle loading and fatigue management) 
• Delivering the required level of customer service (such as reliability and on-time performance) 
• Reducing the cost of ownership and operation 

This is easy to state but can be very complicated and involved; human decision-makers find the size and complexity hard to handle, and the natural reaction is to ‘dumb down’ the problem. Unfortunately, this often includes making decisions or eliminating options before the problem is fully understood. 

For example, vehicle selection is an optimisation problem that considers capital and operating costs, capacity and utilisation factor based on expected jobs and journeys, not just cost per km or cost per hour. Fleet sizing is a similar optimisation problem where rules of thumb or averages just don’t cut it.  

Another example is the optimisation of operations, where decisions are required much more frequently. Again, the problem can be simplified, often leading to over-manning and over-servicing customers when things change. Of course, no-one complains, but unnecessary costs are incurred. 

At the conference session, we would like to discuss the complexity and challenges that fleet managers encounter and present the outcomes and lessons learned from case studies of our work for customers such as Glen Cameron, RFDS, and Allied Express. 

We aim to show how understanding optimisation and adopting an ‘optimisation mindset’ can identify opportunities for change and improvement. We expect participants to take away practical ideas and insights to benefit their organisation.