Management of Shared Customers Through Pool Collaboration in Last-Mile Transportation

摘要

This paper focuses on the management of deliveries to private and shared customers through the use of coalition pool as a collaborative mechanism. Private customers must be served necessarily by the contracted carrier; whereas shared customers agree to be served by any other carrier belonging to the collaborative pool as long as the same level of service is provided. Thus, non-profitable shared customers will be pushed to the pool to be outsourced to interested carriers. The cooperative approach is addressed in a decentralized setting, where each carrier maximizes its profit by serving all private as well as shared profitable customers within their required time windows. A novel Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation is developed and promising illustrative experimental results are carried out.