Lowering CO2 Emissions of Companies by Collaborative Planning of Freight Transport

Society deals with worrying environmental changes, partially caused by high CO2 emissions of freight transport. In this research we investigate whether collaborative freight transport planning can lower the emissions of companies. We focus on collaborations where companies share costumers to reduce travel distance. Our aim is to compare emissions of each company in the case that it collaborates and does not collaborate. To assign emissions to companies in both cases, we consider the five emission allocation methods introduced by Naber et al.(2018). These methods can allocate emissions to various targets, such as the costumers of a company or to the companies themselves. To choose one of the emission allocation methods to work with we determine which method allocates emissions to costumers best. Therefore we evaluate each method on stability, consistency, robustness and computation time by performing a case study. We conclude that the Equal Profit+ method performs best. Using this method we performed a case study in which two or three companies can collaborate. We concluded that when two companies cooperate the emissions of both companies decrease, with 48.2% on average. When three companies cooperate it can happen that one company observes an emission increase. However, the emission decrease of the remaining companies is on average equal to 56.3%, which is higher than when two companies cooperate.