The Dynamic Bowser Routing Problem

We investigate opportunities offered by telematics and analytics to enable better informed, and more integrated, collaborative management decisions across construction sites. We focus on efficient refuelling of assets across construction sites. More specifically, we develop decision support models that, by leveraging data supplied by different assets, schedule refuelling operations by minimising the distance travelled by the refuelling truck — the so-called “bowser” — as well as fuel shortages. Motivated by a practical case study elicited in the context of a project we recently conducted at Crossrail, we introduce the Dynamic Bowser Routing Problem. In this problem the decision maker aims to dynamically refuel, by dispatching a bowser truck, a set of assets which consume fuel and whose location changes over time; the goal is to ensure that assets do not run out of fuel and that the bowser covers the minimum possible distance. We investigate deterministic and stochastic variants of this problem and introduce effective and scalable mathematical programming models to tackle these cases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches in the context of an extensive computational study designed around data collected on site.