Collaborative
Logistics: The Shipper Collaboration Problem
Traditionally companies have focused on improving their
own internal business processes when faced with pressures to operate more
efficiently and more cost effectively. However, a system-wide focus, e.g., a
collaborative focus, opens up cost saving opportunities that are impossible to
achieve with an internal company focus. We discuss an application of
collaboration in logistics from the trucking industry where a buyers'
collaboration is established by a group of shippers pooling together their
shipment requests. This way a tour consisting of shipments from several
different shippers is submitted to the carrier with the expectation that the
quoted total price for the tour will be less then the sum of the prices quoted
for each shipment if they were submitted separately. We first present the
underlying optimization problem and introduce efficient solution algorithms.
Then we discuss issues which arise in designing stable mechanisms for managing
the collaboration and sharing its benefits/costs in a fair way.