Equipment Replacement/Retention Decision Making: Final Report

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) vehicle fleet is a fundamental part of the departmental infrastructure, enabling many activities essential to accomplishing the daily departmental operations. Maintenance of a robust vehicle fleet is essential but costly. On one hand, reductions in fleet costs are potentially beneficial to the department as a whole and thereby beneficial to the taxpayers of the State of Texas. On the other hand, not being able to respond adequately under disaster/emergency conditions is unacceptable and therefore maintaining a fleet robust enough to capably respond in a multi-event contingency is also critical. TxDOT’s new equipment replacement optimization software (TERM2) produced through project 0-6412 “Equipment Replacement Optimization” (ERO) by the research team can optimize the equipment retain/replace decision process, potentially resulting in substantial cost savings. Much of the current TERM2 research work and result findings can be seen from Fan et al. (2011a, 2011b). The technical objectives of this project are to (1) Investigate how to estimate costs to the department of NOT replacing equipment when it should be replaced; (2) Identify methods to estimate downtime costs coupled with TxDOT’s current rightsizing efforts; (3) Review the use and development of advanced optimization techniques; (4) Recommend feasible ways to model the future uncertain purchase costs due to technology changes; (5) Review Texas’s Emergency Management Strategy and support concept and list levels of commitment to the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) and Department of Public Safety (DPS); (6) Identify reasonable and likely simultaneous disaster/emergency event scenarios in Texas (if reasonably available, list equipment commitments for several historical simultaneous emergencies); (7) Review and describe how other state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and major metropolitan governments provision their fleets to handle multiple disasters. To accomplish this project, the research team has addressed the above issues and implemented in the TERM2 software and conducted a comprehensive review of the state of the art and state of the practice of equipment replacement/retention decisions based on future uncertain purchase costs, unavailability of funds, and disaster preparedness and a new TERM2 software has been developed with enhanced functionalities.