Utilization Management of Highway Operations Equipment

This paper presents fleet utilization management processes for highway operations equipment based on actual tracked and reported usage data obtained from transportation agencies. The objective is to minimize total fleet utilization costs, including operational, purchase, and relocation expenses that yield the optimal utilization values and fleet composition of specific equipment types within each region in a year. The framework includes utilization prediction and optimization models, rather than relying on pre-determined utilization thresholds in existing strategies, to avoid under-utilization, over-utilization, or both. The prediction models are structured using equipment explanatory variables with their significant contributing factors, for example, annual equipment usage, annual fuel cost, downtime hours, age, and class code, to predict operational costs. The optimization model is formulated as a set of mathematical formulations, with embedded predictive models, that minimizes the total costs of (i) keeping an asset in-service using predictive annual operational cost functions, (ii) purchasing new assets in a region in the following year, and (iii) relocating assets by capturing the distance between regions. The costs include equipment purchase, operation, maintenance, and transportation expenses. The proposed framework captures the remedial actions to balance under-/over-utilized assets in the fleet in a cost-efficient manner. The proposed methodology is applied to utilization management of a set of operations equipment, and the findings of the dump trucks are presented. Several scenarios are designed to analyze the sensitivity of the costs to various decisions and parameters. The numerical experiments reveal that the proposed framework can facilitate the utilization prediction and management of highway operations equipment and save up to 16.6% in operational costs considering different demand scenarios.