Project R-5494

Modelling freight consolidation from the perspective of transportation carriers (Research)

To survive under the ever increasing competitive and global pressures to operate more efficiently, transportation companies are obliged to adopt a collaborative, instead of an internal, focus. Various types of cooperative supply chain relationships have been discussed in both professional and academic literature over the last decades. However, research on horizontal cooperation in logistics remains scarce and scattered across various research domains. Companies operating at the same level of the supply chain and performing comparable logistics functions may cooperate horizontally to increase their productivity, improve their service level and enhance their market position. The aim of my doctoral research is to study collaborative logistics from the perspective of road transportation carriers through an extensive study of the operational planning of horizontal carrier cooperations. In a first phase the joint route planning of multiple carriers is formulated as a static vehicle routing problem and solved with an appropriate meta-heuristic. Moreover, the impact of coalition characteristics on attainable collaborative savings is examined in a joint route planning context. The second phase of my research focuses on the development of a new approach to horizontal carrier collaboration: the sharing of warehouses or distribution centres with partnering organisations. In addition, extensive numerical experiments based on experimental design are carried out to analyse and compare the benefits of cooperative facility location and the effects of different cost allocation techniques. Finally, a goal programming approach is applied to expand our research focus from considering cost minimisation exclusively to account for customer service effects in a horizontal collaboration context.

01 October 2014 - 30 September 2017