The iconic yellow school buses are an instantly-recognizable trademark of North American society. Millions of children rely on school buses to get to school every single day. Delivering such a vital transportation service is an essential yet also difficult logistical challenge that relies on effective fleet management.
The responsibility of managing school buses usually does not lie directly with the school district itself, but with specialized companies that are contracted to manage the school bus operations. One of OSI’s clients is one of the largest school bus operators in North America, which owns many thousands of school buses that are deployed across hundreds of school districts across the US and Canada.
Our client’s operations form a massive international network of districts that can share and manage their fleet as one. Effective management of such a large fleet requires extremely careful planning. OSI has designed a specialized software application backed by cutting-edge optimization algorithms to manage our client’s fleet across this extensive network of districts.
Each school district has its own set of unique specifications for their buses. For example, most districts have a limit on the average age and maximum age of their buses. As buses age, the composition of the fleet at each district needs to be continuously revised in order to make sure that all specifications are met.
For each bus at the end of each school year, the company can make one of the following decisions: Keep the bus at the current district, transfer it to a new contract, replace the bus with a brand new vehicle, or simply dispose the bus altogether without replacement.
OSI’s custom optimization model creates a five-year plan on how to manage each vehicle in their fleet using this set of decisions, all while enforcing strict adherence to district specifications and minimizing the capital expenditure resulting from transferring and purchasing buses.
Historically, this fleet management plan has been created by hand using traditional tools like excel workbooks. So why invest in mathematical optimization? The power of optimization lies in its extraordinary ability to manage the extreme and often surprising interconnectedness of fleet decisions.
Singular decisions can have major cascading effects across the entire network. For example, if a bus has become too old for its current district, it can likely be transferred to a less restrictive district in order to extend its lifetime. However, this may leave the original contract with a bus shortage to serve all of its routes, requiring an incoming transfer from yet another district. A fleet planner quickly ends up with a complicated chain of transfers triggered by just one bus that has become too old. On top of that, these transfers may also affect the average age of the fleet at each district, which in turn forces more transfers or replacements to maintain all average age specifications.
Optimizing a fleet management plan by hand quickly becomes completely intractable. Unlike humans, optimization algorithms fully consider these intricate network dependencies, allowing for much more efficient solutions. OSI’s fleet planning application provides a plan that saves millions of dollars in capital expenditure compared to plans created by hand.
Sustainability: OSI’s fleet management plans prevent all unnecessary transfers and replacements, resulting in a more sustainable solution not just for the pocket book but also for our environment.
Automation: Not only is the plan better, its creation is now automated, freeing up hundreds of labor hours that can now be leveraged on other initiatives.
Responsiveness: OSI’s application also creates plans much faster than humans can. Whereas making a manual fleet plan is a weeks-long process, the run time for OSI’s fleet management application hovers safely under an hour. This allows for regular upkeep of the fleet plan as districts are added, lost, or have their contract specifications revised. A quick runtime allows the company’s fleet management to be more responsive to continuously evolving requirements.
