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Transport companies may cooperate to increase their efficiency levels by e.g. the exchange of orders or vehicle capacity. In this paper a new approach to horizontal carrier collaboration is presented: the sharing of distribution centres (DCs) with partnering organisations. This problem can be classified as a cooperative facility location problem and formulated as an innovative mixed integer linear program. To ensure cooperation sustainability, collaborative costs need to be allocated fairly to the different participants. To analyse the benefits of cooperative facility location and the effects of different cost allocation techniques, numerical experiments based on experimental design are carried out on a U.K.case study. Sharing DCs may lead to significant cost savings up to 21.6%. In contrast to the case of sharing orders or vehicles, there are diseconomies of scale in terms of the number of partners and more collaborative benefit can be expected when partners are unequal in size. Moreover, results indicate that horizontal collaboration at the level of DCs works well with a limited number of partners and can be based on intuitively appealing cost sharing techniques, which may reduce alliance complexity and enforce the strength of mutual partner relationships.

Logistics service providers become increasingly aware of the need to collaborate to face challenges such as globalization and the heightened expectations of customers. This paper focuses on horizontal cooperation between logistics service providers in road transportation and introduces two novel conceptual models. Firstly, a decision framework for the development and management of horizontal logistics alliances is presented. This framework provides support to logistics service providers considering horizontal collaboration and allows for the analysis of the decision process underlying horizontal logistics alliances. The cyclical framework consists of five stages and attributes a central position to continuous evaluation. Secondly, an easy-to-use typology is proposed which defines six horizontal collaboration types based on their activity scope and degree of structural intertwinement. The typology provides logistics service providers with insights in the various horizontal collaboration types, including some key management questions. Both models are validated by knowledgeable practitioners and are applied to two real-life case studies.

The thesis studies horizontal logistics cooperation in depth on a strategic and operational level. Horizontal collaboration between logistics service providers has become an important research area, since severe competition in global markets, rising costs, a growing body of transport legislation and heightened customer expectations have caused profit margins of organisations to shrink. Engaging in a horizontal logistics cooperation provides various efficiency improving opportunities. However, collaboration projects also have significant failure rates due to their inherent complexity. Current research on horizontal logistics collaboration mainly focuses on describing its opportunities, challenges and structure or demonstrates its cost reduction potential. However, the extent and long-term sustainability of collaborative benefits highly depend on the characteristics of the collaboration, its partners and the applied allocation mechanisms. In this context, the research contribution of the doctoral thesis is twofold. First, the benefits associated with horizontal logistics cooperation are quantified within differing collaborative environments. Second, the conditions necessary to achieve collaborative synergy are investigated. More specifically, the impact of various collaboration strategies, partner characteristics and allocation mechanisms on collaborative performance and stability is statistically analysed in three collaborative settings. The thesis provides support to freight transport companies considering collaboration by analysing three horizontal cooperation settings: two distinct unimodal carrier coalitions and one intermodal shipper coalition. First, in the majority of horizontal carrier alliances customer orders from all participating

In order to survive under the ever increasing pressure to operate more efficiently, transportation companies are obliged to adopt a collaborative focus. Although organisations become increasingly aware of the inevitable character of horizontal collaboration, surveys report failure rates up to 70 percent for starting strategic partnerships. While a growing body of research acknowledges the importance of fit between partners for coalition sustainability, no extensive study has been performed on the numerical relationship between specific company traits and the performance of the alliances these organisations are involved in. This paper empirically investigates the impact of coalition characteristics on attainable collaborative savings in a joint route planning context. Factorial analysis of variance is applied to examine desirable coalition structures for horizontal carrier collaborations based on request sharing. Overall, our experiments suggest that carriers may reap significant operational benefits from sharing orders. However, the extent of these benefits highly depends on the characteristics of the partnering organisations, stressing the importance of careful partner selection.

Collaboration in emergency logistics can be beneficial for governmental actors when supply chains need to be set up immediately. In comparison to research on humanitarian-business partnerships, the body of literature on so-called Public-Private Emergency Collaborations (PPEC) remains scarce. Private companies are only rarely considered within research on emergency collaborations, although they could contribute to a more efficient supply of goods given their resources and existing communication networks. Based on this research gap, this paper develops a logistical and game-theoretical modeling framework for public-private emergency collaborations. We characterize both public and private actors' possible roles in emergency logistics based on literature research and real cases. Furthermore, we provide an overview on existing PPECs and the challenges they are confronted with. The concluding framework contains aspects from humanitarian logistics on the governmental side and from business continuity management (BCM) or corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the commercial side. To address the challenge of evaluating different objectives in a collaboration, we add a game-theoretical approach to highlight the incentive structure of both parties in such a collaboration. In this way, we contribute to the research field by quantitatively evaluating public-private collaboration in emergency logistics while considering the problem-specific challenge of the parties' different objectives.

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This paper studies the operations of intermodal barge terminals. The objective is to increase the terminal's efficiency by supporting the operational planning of the terminal operator. For this purpose, a review on general and process-specific barge terminal planning problems, discussed in current scientific literature, is provided. This theoretical knowledge is validated in practice by means of a comparison with operational planning realities at Haven Genk, a Belgian trimodal terminal. Finally, simulation studies based on Haven Genk data are performed to investigate whether vessel size and number of vessels in use have an impact on barge terminal efficiency.