Modeling and solving the short-term car rental logistics problem

Logistics management in the car rental business involves short-term decisions about the transportation and deployment of cars with regard to optimizing fleet utilization while maintaining a high service level. We model and solve this problem by means of minimum cost network flow optimization under consideration of essential practical needs such as multi-period planning, a country-wide network, customized transportation relations, fleeting and defleeting, and car groups with partial substitutability. Experiments were conducted on substantial real-world data, using a simulation model to assess optimization results for different scenarios. The results indicate that the proposed approach can significantly improve efficiency.