Fleet Sizing under Production Cycles and Uncertain Travel Times

This paper develops a model for sizing a fleet of containers used to ship parts from a single manufacturing plant to a group of assembly plants. Parts are produced in a deterministic production cycle, but container travel times are stochastic. Based on results for an infinite-channel service process, equations are developed relating fleet size to the probability of a container shortage. An example illustrates this fleet size-shortage probability trade-off and shows the impact of uncertainty level and the number of plants on fleet size.