Horizontal cooperation among freight carriers: request allocation and profit sharing

摘要: In modern transportation systems, the potential for further decreasing costs of fulfilling customer requests is severely limited while market competition constantly reducing revenues. However, increased competitiveness through cost reductions can be achieved if freight carriers cooperate in order to balance their request portfolios. Participation such coalitions benefit entire coalition, as well each participant individually, thus reinforcing position partners. The work presented this paper uniquely combines features routing and scheduling problems cooperative game theory. first part, profit margins resulting from horizontal cooperation among are analysed. It assumed that structure corresponds a pickup delivery problem with time windows carrier. second possibilities sharing these fairly partners discussed. Shapley value used determine fair allocation. Numerical results real-life artificial instances presented.