*This research considers how to determine the optimal fleet size and vehicle transfer policy for a rental-car company that serves two cities.

*In each city, there are single-trip and round-trip customers, where the former is given a higher priority. Because of the single-trip traffic, the number of cars at these two cities may become unbalanced. Hence, the central planner in each day needs to decide whether to transfer any cars from one city to the other.

*They develop a two-stage dynamic programming model, in which they determine the vehicle transfer policy in the second stage and the optimal fleet size in the first stage.

*They show that if vehicle transfer policy is not appropriate, the overall performance can drastically deteriorate even with the optimal fleet size.

We consider a useful research to determine the optimal fleet size and vehicle transfer policy for a car rental company with several works centres.

The article can be found at:

*Zhaolin, Li., Feng, Tao. 2010. On determining optimal fleet size and vehicle transfer policy for a car rental company. Computers and Operation Research. 37, 341-350.

On determining optimal fleet size and vehicle transfer policy for a car rental company