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.

• Record URL:
  https://library.ctr.utexas.edu/ctr-publications/0-6693-1.pdf
• 
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Report Date October 2013; Published August 2015. This report also contains products 0-6693-P1 (Robust Statistical Estimating and Forecasting Models used to Investigate the Future Uncertain Purchase Costs due to Technology Changes and the Down Time Costs coupled with TxDOT’s Current Rightsizing Efforts).
• Corporate Authors:

  University of Texas, Tyler

  College of Engineering and Computer Science
  3900 University Boulevard
  Tyler, TX  United States  75799

  University of Texas, Austin

  Center for Transportation Research, 1616 Guadalupe Street
  Austin, TX  United States  78701-1255

  Texas Department of Transportation

  Research and Technology Implementation Office, P.O. Box 5080
  Austin, TX  United States  78763-5080

  Federal Highway Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Fan, Wei
  • Haile, Elias
  • Chavez, Tomas
  • Radley, Lee
  • Sorbet, Robert
  • Eifert, Annie
  • Machemehl, Randy
  • Gemar, Mason
  • Murshed, Neaz
  • Yu, Yao
• Publication Date: 2015-8

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Edition: Technical Report
• Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 204p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Cost estimating; Decision making; Disaster preparedness; Equipment maintenance; Equipment replacement; Optimization; Software; State departments of transportation; Vehicle fleets; Vehicle maintenance
• Identifier Terms: Texas Department of Transportation
• Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting; Vehicles and Equipment; I60: Maintenance; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01576178
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: FHWA/TX-15/0-6693-1, 0-6693-1
• Contract Numbers: 0-6693
• Files: TRIS, ATRI, USDOT, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Sep 25 2015 4:17PM