A fuzzy approach to the vehicle assignment problem

Transportation companies receive a great number of requests every day from clients wanting to send goods to different destinations. Their fleets often consist of several different types of vehicles. Dispatchers assign vehicles to transportation requests relying primarily on their experience and intuition. When assigning a certain type of vehicle to a transportation request, the dispatcher must bear in mind a large number of different factors. This paper considers the vehicle assignment problem when vehicle dispatching is done “today for tomorrow”. The paper develops a model based on fuzzy logic that assigns different types of vehicles to planned transportation tasks. The model is tested on a real numerical example. The results of testing the model indicate that it outperforms the work of an experienced dispatcher.