Transportation assets and asset management

Another component of transportation costs includes transportation assets. For instance, a scenario may only have access to a specific number of trucks for a certain amount of time per day. Each asset can have a fixed acquisition cost, an operating cost, and a quantity, as well as aspects like speed, capacity, and availability.

Transportation assets add a significant level of complexity to optimization and simulation, requiring additional costs and shipment timing constraints.

If you create transportation assets, but do not assign a Unit Fixed Cost to the assets, the optimized number of units will always equal the number of Units set on the Transportation Assets input table. As a result, the Transportation Asset Utilization in the Transportation Asset Summary Network Optimization output table will always be reported as 1. In reality, there may be cases when not all units are in use at all times. Therefore, you should assign costs to your Transportation Assets if you want the utilization to be more realistically determined.