Cooperative Management in Full-Truckload and Less-Than-Truckload Vehicle System

In cooperative logistics, shippers can cooperate to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of product/package delivery services. In this paper, we consider the resource, i.e., vehicles, sharing problem to serve customers in the cooperative logistics environment. In the environment, small shippers cooperate by forming a coalition to create a vehicle pool and to allow sharing of their own vehicles with each other. The vehicles in the pool are used to deliver packages to customers. To minimize the delivery cost to the shippers, we propose a framework for the capacitated vehicle routing problem with time windows. The framework is composed of joint vehicle allocation, cost management, and overlapping coalition formation among shippers. For vehicle allocation, we formulate and solve optimization models to determine the number of vehicles and their delivery routes to meet customer demand and service time. The uncertainty of customer demand is taken into consideration. For sharing the delivery cost generated in the vehicle pool, i.e., cost management, among the cooperative shippers in a coalition, we apply the concept of Myerson value from the cooperative game theory as a solution. Based on the cost, the shippers then decide whether to cooperate and share the vehicles or not. The performance evaluation based on the test and actual road networks clearly shows the benefits of the proposed framework.