One way to obtain a feasible cooperation is to first find cooperative planning solutions to minimize the total operating cost, and then to distribute the profit among all operators in such a way that a fair distribution is reached. The work presented in this paper focuses on the important step of finding the cooperative transport plans that can minimize the total freight delivery cost (i.e., the total operating cost) of all operators. Calculation of side-payments, as part of a future fairness approach, could be based on the differences between the obtained cooperative planning solutions and the corresponding freight delivery costs of operators in the cooperative planning and the planning solutions and the corresponding freight delivery costs of operators in a situation where each operators performs its own transport planning without cooperation. This paper considers that each operator adopts an Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy for the flow planning problem within an overall multi-level freight transport planning framework. This multi-level planning framework consists of the flow planning level and the container planning level, and integrates the information from different planning level with appropriate mapping approaches. We refer to our earlier work