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Dynamic Collaborative Transportation Planning:
A Rolling Horizon Planning Approach
Xin Wang and Herbert Kopfer
Chair of Logistics, University of Bremen,
Wilhelm-Herbst-Str. 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany
{xin.wang,kopfer}@uni-bremen.de
Abstract.
Small and mid-sized freight carriers are suggested to coop-
erate with fellow companies and to perform collaborative transportation
planning (CTP) enabling an exchange of customer requests for higher op-
erational eciencies. In order to realize the synergy embedded in CTP,
appropriate request exchange mechanisms have to be developed. Com-
pared to their static counterparts, little research has been conducted
on dynamic CTP problems (DCTPP). In this paper, the DCTPP of a
coalition of freight carriers offering full truckload transport services is
presented. A rolling horizon planning approach is proposed to solve this
problem. Computational studies are carried out to identify the potential
of cost-savings through CTP and to analyze the influence of the degree
of dynamism of instances on the planning results.
Keywords:
Dynamic pickup and delivery problem, Dynamic collabora-
tive transportation planning, Rolling horizon planning, Horizontal carrier
collaboration, Distributed decision making, Request exchange.
1 Introduction
Nowadays, freight carriers are confronted with increasing pressures to improve
the operational eciency of transportation fulfillment. Compared with large for-
warding companies which can consolidate requests to a high extend by exploit-
ing the economy of scale, it is dicult for small and mid-sized carriers (SMC)
to reach the same eciency. Exploiting synergies by performing collaborative
planning in a horizontal coalition may be considered as a promising remedy.
Through exchanging customer transportation requests with other coalition
members, freight carriers may reduce their operational costs up to 30 percent
[7]. In such horizontal coalitions of carriers, transportation planning is not per-
formed by each participant separately but in a concerted fashion, which is re-
ferred to as collaborative transportation planning (CTP) [31]. According to [27],
CTP can be understood here as a joint decision making process for aligning
plans of individual members with the aim of achieving coordination in light of
information asymmetry. This means that private information and autonomy of
coalition members will be preserved while the quality of the plans of all mem-
bers is intended to be improved. In CTP, all partners generate plans only for
