Funding source: US DOT

Contract number: DTRT13-G-UTC57

Funding amount: $100,000

Performance period: 9/1/2017 to 8/31/2018

Project description

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 36 states are experiencing shortages in rest areas, affecting the truck drivers' ability to comply with working hour regulations. This issue points to the need of better utilizing the existing truck parking capacity, as expanding the infrastructure would require significant capital investment. In this study we presented a mixed integer programming model to the truck driver scheduling problem under the USA Hours-of-Service regulations which include the parking availability of the rest areas along a route as time-windows conditioned to the scheduling of a rest stop. We also include in our MIP model the USA weekly working hours constraint. This constraint is required for long trips, but is usually not treated as most papers limit the trip's duration and required on-duty time. In order to alleviate scalability issues due to the model's complexity, we also studied when can the optimality of a solution found by a simplified model be guaranteed. In addition, we proposed a formulation for the vehicle shortest path and truck driver scheduling problem, which was modeled as a shortest path problem with resource constraints.