A collaborative approach for solving the portfolio re-composition problem in transport cooperations

Abstract

A carrier company determines routes in order to fulfill a given set of customer requests (portfolio). Some requests cannot be fulfilled due to limited transport resources. External logistics service provider are paid for serving these requests. The charges to be paid often exceed the earned revenues. On the other hand, some carriers cannot use their complete capacities because they have not acquired enough requests. Groupage Systems (GS) are set up in order to enable a request interchange between several carriers and to achieve an equilibrium between the demanded and the available transport resources. In the Portfolio Re-composition Problem (PRP) it is aimed at recomposing the carrier’s portfolios by transferring requests between several carriers. In this article, we present an optimization model for the PRP and propose a two-step collaborative solution algorithm. In the first step, each carrier identifies the most profitable requests. In the second step, a mediator assigns the requests to these carriers and solves conflicts occurring if two or more carriers want to serve the same requests. We set up an experiment to simulate the GS behavior and present numerical results and compare them with the results obtained by a non-collaborative approach.