Fleet Logistics Optimization

Companies around the world in all working sectors tend to optimize their logistic processes in order to optimize many operational factors that are important for the future success of the company. The logistics sector can be vast, this study focuses on optimizing transportation- related logistic processes for Peluso Automotive Group, a company involved in the transportation of luxury/racing vehicles across Europe. Within the transportation logistic sector, this becomes challenging since no ready-made available software in the market is capable of providing easily a system that can automatically assign routes and orders to trucks while considering EU driver regulation constraints or varying vehicle sizes & types. This is due to many issues such as complex setup and limitations in the tools offered in already existing transportation logistic software’s. For instance, some software’s don’t even take into account truck specific restrictions when calculating routes and solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The main contribution of the work defined in this report is to create a lightweight digital tool using HERE Routing API and Google OR-Tools managed through PYTHON in order to automatically assign the optimal routes which are based on truck size parameters and legal restrictions and then assign the orders to trucks by defining an overall objective such as reducing overall distance of the trucks. HERE Routing API will be used for obtaining detailed distance, time and fuel consumption matrix for each truck which will then be fed into OR-Tools, an optimization solver by Google capable of solving the VRP with real life realistic constraints such as applying delivery time windows and maximum legal driving hours limitation. A small and a large case simulation were tested in this study to evaluate its performance. The project proved that utilizing tools such as HERE Routing and OR-Tools resulted in efficient & realistic route planning aligned with the EU truck regulations and along with the capability of automatically assigning orders to trucks. While many limitations still exist in this study, such as simplifying specific driver related constraints or the simulations not being done in real time, it is still essential to emphasize that similar light weight solutions must be available for small to mid- sized companies, rather than the gap in the market where most software’s required offer an extremely complex setup and extremely high cost making it only possible for large companies.