Collaborative transportation planning (CTP) within a coalition of small and
medium-sized freight carriers can be used as a powerful instrument to improve the operational
efficiency of the coalition members. In such coalitions, transportation requests
from different carriers are exchanged in order to reduce the total fulfillment costs. In
this paper, the CTP for a set of independent carriers exchanging less-than-truckload
transportation requests is considered. The realistic restriction that all collaborating
partners have only limited capacities in their fleets is included in the consideration.
To keep their autonomy, coalition members keep their sensitive information including
customer payments and cost structures unexposed during CTP. A new decentralized
request exchange mechanism for CTP is proposed while only vehicle routes are considered
for exchange. It is tested on some newly generated instances and the CTP
solutions are compared with those obtained by isolated planning without collaboration
and those obtained by a heuristic approach for the centralized planning problem.
The results indicate that our mechanism is very efficient and effective in terms of realizing
potential cost-savings by CTP, even when capacity limitations and restrictions
on the exposure of information are explicitly considered.