ECONOMIC MODELING OF COMMERCIAL VEHICLE FLEET UTILIZATION AND REVENUE OPTIMIZATION IN SAUDI ARABIA: A STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK FOR VISION 2030

Commercial fleets are the glue that holds the entire transport system together, connecting production to ports, industrial clusters and the final market. The economic value of a vehicle is far less to do with its registered capacity than with its actual productive deployment. This is a critical integrative review of the interplay between fleet utilisation, pricing, empty running, demand uncertainty and asset ownership in the context of the transformation of transport in Saudi Arabia. It draws on a range of research published between 2020 and 2025 in the areas of freight forecasting, dynamic routing, carrier collaboration, vehicle economics and Saudi transport policy. It proposes a revenue-utilisation framework which distinguishes between vehicle availability, productive time, payload use and realised yield and then links these to route level contribution and fleet investment decisions. It identifies four key mechanisms: better forecasting protects dispatch capacity; network collaboration recovers movements that would otherwise be unproductive; pricing should be based on constrained vehicle-hours rather than distance; and alternative propulsion should be evaluated in terms of duty cycle feasibility and opportunity cost. A simple illustrative calculation is provided to show how changes in utilisation and backhaul recovery can impact on contribution, without in any way implying that these are the outcomes observed in the Saudi fleet. The review concludes with a research agenda for testing these mechanisms using anonymised dispatch, telematics and financial data. The central proposition is that alignment with Vision 2030 will only be achieved through sustainable productivity gains underpinned by tangible constraints on safety, service and the environment rather than through maximising fleet size or the volume of vehicles in movement.