Hybrid transportation in a coordinated single-vendor multi-buyers supply chain

Transportation is one of the major components in supply chain management. In the real world, there are two kinds of transportation modes, namely, less-than-truckload (LTL) and full-truckload (FTL) transportation. Most of the literatures in supply chain coordination not only assumed the transportation cost to be constant regardless of the order size but also neglected the capacity of truck. In this paper, we consider a coordinated single-vendor multi-buyer supply chain model with a hybrid of LTL and FTL which takes into account the buyers' ordering sizes as well as truck capacity. Our results show that the coordinated model with hybrid transportation works better than the independent policy.