Articles

Fleet management systems increasingly fold a vehicle's predicted mechanical condition into the same decision that assigns it to a delivery, a route, or a shift, treating the health signal as one more input alongside distance and time windows. This article derives the condition under which that practice improves fleet-level outcomes instead of relocating cost from one part of the fleet to another. Two bodies of prior work bear on the question without meeting: optimization research that couples maintenance forecasts with routing decisions treats forecast reliability as fixed, while cost-benefit research on prognostics quantifies how forecast error erodes value only up to the maintenance-scheduling decision. Reading the two together yields a closed-form breakeven inequality linking a diagnostic classifier's recall and false-positive rate to the ratio between a missed-failure cost and a false-exclusion cost, scaled by the fleet's base fault rate. Applied to published component-level classifier performance and to two documented vehicle telemetry regimes, the inequality holds comfortably for every heavy-duty component category under baseline operating costs, producing a positive net benefit at each, but flips sign for a constrained on-board-diagnostic regime once exclusion cost and base fault rate shift toward values realistic for a tightly scheduled light-duty fleet, generating a measured net loss per dispatched vehicle. The result identifies fleet heterogeneity in sensing infrastructure as the variable that determines whether condition-aware dispatch pays for itself.