Rest break policy comparison for heavy vehicle drivers in Australia

Carriers and postal companies are under increasing pressure to reduce their operating costs and increase efficiency. One way to reduce costs is to improve the utilisation of drivers' working hours by employing more efficient rest break policies. A rest break policy is a restrictive set of rules consistent with national regulations for hours of service. We develop and validate a novel framework to model and analyse a class of these policies that concern the location of the rest breaks. In particular, we compare two representative rest break policies using data from a major Australian postal carrier. The first policy imposes no restriction on the location of a rest break. The second policy requires the driver to return to a depot for rest taking allowing time for socialising and making use of full amenities. Using postal transport data from Sydney metropolitan area, we find that the difference between the two policies in terms of tour length is only over 1%. We further apply the proposed framework to assess the impact of increasing the minimum break time on the two representative policies.