Collaboration in Transport and Logistics Networks

Collaboration is a way to open possibilities for achieving logistics’ network economies of scale. The success of new network design concepts building on the domains of the Physical Internet, City Logistics, synchromodal networks, etc. is also to a large part depending upon the ability to successfully collaborate and agree on cost-and-benefit sharing mechanisms. Yet, designing a fair cost-and-benefit sharing scheme is a major impediment for collaboration. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of approaches in dealing with cost sharing problems in collaborative logistics and network design. We discuss cost sharing problems in some basic and stylized network design models as well as more operational problems in collaborative transport and logistics. We distinguish between two alternative approaches to solve cost sharing problems. The first approach defines a cooperative game associated with the situation and uses cooperative game theory to come up with allocations and/or cost-shares. The second approach deals directly with the situation at hand and obtains cost-shares using the information contained in the situation. In this approach, the solution often relies on the structure of the underlying optimization problems. The specific features of cooperative situations provide grounds for refining well-known solutions in cooperative game theory or develop new ones that are appropriate for special situations.