collaboration or competition of carriers influence the service level,the synchronization, and the system performance. In practice, an independent party manages each hub and leg of a multimodal transportation network. In the presence of their cooperation, for instance, a terminal operating company receives the information on the arrival of a ship or trains early enough to plan the necessary unloading, transshipment and loading tasks. In addition, the cooperating
carriers can react to disruptions faster, using vehicles, modes, and resources of each other. Puettmann and Stadtler
(2010) test the idea that collaboration reduces the operational costs on a chain with one multimodal operator and two carriers responsible for pre-haul and end-haul drayage. In their scheme, the three parties do not exchange any information and plan their own operations, however they iteratively exchange proposals and their cost effects are compared to the solution without coordination.
Due to the time lag between the departure and arrival of orders, they include stochastic demand in their scheme, which calls for adaptation of plans. The authors present three models for the proposal generation for the involved parties and use a scenario tree generation to quantify the expected gain of coordination. At the end, they conclude that transportation parties can significantly reduce in operational costs by collaboration.