© XIV. International Logistics and Supply Chain Congress December 01-02, 2016, Izmir, TURKIYE 386 COST-EFFICIENCY OF VEHICLE TRACKING SYSTEMS (VTS): A CASE STUDY FOR 30 VEHICLES Zafer YILMAZ 1 , Hakan Ömer TUNCA 2 , Gürkan SERHADLIOĞLU 3 Abstract - Vehicle Tracking Systems (VTS) are used by Fleet operators for fleet management functions such as fleet tracking, routing, dispatching, on-board information and security. VTS technology is also used by the Municipalities to monitor schedule adherence of buses in service, trigger changes of busses’ destination sign displays at the end of the line (or other set location along a bus route), and trigger pre- recorded announcements for passengers. Especially for routing, tracking, security, rescheduling and cost efficiency purpose, the public organizations such as ministries, military headquarters in big cities are highly encouraged to use VTS on their vehicles ranging from small cars to midibuses, buses and lorries in order to transport its personnel and equipment. In this study, we aimed to find cost efficiency of using VTS on personnel service vehicles of a public organization. We selected 30 vehicles as a sample study. We put VTS on these vehicles and collected data by observing the vehicles during one year. According to this sample implementation, we aimed to compare the oil consumption and the expenditures of the accidents of the data does not fit a particular parametric family of distributions, specifically; a normal distribution. Therefore, we used Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test to find the results of our study. According to the results of the test, using VTS on vehicles is found to be meaningful to decrease the oil consumption but using VTS is not found cost- efficient on the expenditures of the accidents. We also proposed the optimal distances that will be cost- efficient to use VTS on the vehicles. Keywords - Cost-Efficiency, Oil Consumption, Vehicle Tracking Systems, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. INTRODUCTION A vehicle tracking system combines the use of automatic vehicle location in individual vehicles with software that collects these fleet data for a comprehensive picture of vehicle locations [1]. GPS or GLONASS technology is the most common way used by Modern vehicle tracking systems for locating the vehicle; however other types of automatic vehicle location technology can also be used. The location of the vehicle can be followed on electronic maps via the Internet or other special software. Urban public transit authorities mainly in large cities and the organizations which have large number of vehicle fleets are increasingly common users of vehicle tracking systems. The logistics departments of the big transportation organizations use vehicle tracking systems commonly for fleet management functions such as fleet tracking, routing, dispatching, on-board information and security. Along with public and private organizations and commercial fleet operators, urban transit agencies use the technology for a number of purposes, including monitoring schedule adherence of buses in service, triggering changes of buses' destination sign displays at the end of the line, and triggering pre-recorded announcements for passengers. The American Public Transportation Association estimated that, at the beginning of 2009, around half of all transit buses in the United States were already using a GPS-based vehicle tracking system to trigger automated stop announcements [2]. Such programs are also used to provide customers with real-time information as to the waiting time until arrival of the next bus or tram/streetcar at a given stop, based on the nearest vehicles' actual progress at the time, rather than merely giving information as to the scheduled time of the next arrival [3]. Transit systems providing this kind of information assign a unique number to each stop, and waiting passengers 1 Zafer YILMAZ, Turkish Army, zyilmaz1996@gmail.com 2 Hakan Ömer TUNCA, Turkish Army, hotunca@hotmail.com 3 Gürkan SERHADLIOĞLU, Turkish Army, gserhadlioglu@kkk.tsk.tr