Traditional and extended fleets in literature and practice: definition and untapped potential

The concept of fleet is traditionally discussed in certain industries, such as military, marine, logistics, and aviation industries. In asset management context, the fleet can also consist of machineries or equipment. It would be beneficial to exploit the learnings from the traditional fleet management fields in other environments, where fleets can be considered in an extended manner. E.g., digitalisation generates massive amounts of data which can be exploited more efficiently for fleet management purposes. The aim of this paper is to identify fleets appearing in the literature and to find out whether we should make extended fleet definitions to which the fleet management practices from traditional fleets can be applied. The research has been conducted by reviewing the literature and describing empirical examples of different fleets. The results indicate that fleet management learnings can be applied widely to different types of asset groups, in other words to extended fleets. There is potential to apply fleet management, e.g., to improving business processes, managing complex systems as a fleet, and categorising fleets at multiple levels.