Cooperative transport provides the opportunity for logistic service providers to reduce costs while also receiving additional benefits such as a reduced carbon footprint. To this end, potentially competing companies are asked to join forces. This thesis strives to give an insight into the benefits of cooperative transportation by providing a mathematical foundation for cooperative transportation and visualising its results. In this manner, the potential benefits to each collaborator become more clear. In this thesis a new cooperative game is introduced. The joint network vehicle routing game is a generalisation of the vehicle routing game. In this generalisation each player is allowed to have multiple locations. As the new game is a generalisation of the vehicle routing game, one can show that the core of the joint network vehicle routing game can be empty. Besides this, it is shown that the joint network vehicle routing game is monotonic, sub-additive and under some simplistic assumptions even essential. The joint network vehicle routing game has been solved using a multitude of randomly generated instances, each with different characteristics. The amount of players, locations and locations per player have been varied along with the spacial structure of the instances. Then, each of the instances has been solved using a variety of solution algorithms. These solution algorithms are based upon relaxed as well as exact constraint and column generating techniques. Overall, the algorithms utilising constraint generation outperformed the algorithms that did not utilise constraint generation. Furthermore, it is shown that an average cost reduction from 17% up to 55% can be obtained for each of the involved players. The average savings are shown to depend heavily on the structure of the instances. Most savings are achieved if the locations of each player are not clustered but randomly located throughout the considered space.

Spliet, R.
hdl.handle.net/2105/39165
Econometrie
Erasmus School of Economics

Zon, M.A. van (Mathijs). (2017, September 11). Cost allocation in cooperative transport: The joint network vehicle routing game. Econometrie. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2105/39165