OPTIMIZING TRUCK SCHEDULING MODEL FOR OFFICE OF PHYSICAL PLANT (OPP)
Open Access
- Author:
- Sharma, Pallavi
- Graduate Program:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 22, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Vittaldas Prabhu, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Steven James Landry, Committee Member
Olga Pak, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Truck scheduling
Association Rule Mining
Apriori Algorithm
Optimization
Truck-sharing - Abstract:
- The Office of Physical Plant (OPP) stewards more than 22,000 acres of land and 32 million square feet of buildings, serving maintenance requests across the campus of Pennsylvania State University throughout the year. The department’s current truck scheduling method results in an increased truck movement throughout the campus with reduction in the truck utilization rate leading to the concept of “empty truck trips”. The truck scheduling problem can be solved by adopting truck-sharing phenomenon. This thesis focuses on proposing a modified truck scheduling method for the OPP department to decrease the overall truck movement done in a day to execute the required maintenance requests, thereby reducing empty truck trips. Association rule mining has been used to support the truck-sharing concept. The raw transactional data provided by the OPP department is analyzed to deduce relationships among the different work types, labors, and the truck movements, merging them into a smaller dataset to apply data-mining algorithm. Association rule mining algorithm has been applied to the processed data to determine relationship among different labors executing same maintenance requests together. The found rules are validated to prove the consolidation of labors found in a rule and visualized in the form of network graphs. The rules have been then evaluated to account for the total reduction in truck movement if the labors found to have strong patterns are consolidated into fewer trucks. The results from the Apriori Algorithm indicate that 50% improvement in truck movement can be obtained if the OPP department consolidates labors according to the rules found keeping in mind the constraints chosen.