A review on cost allocation methods in collaborative transportation

Abstract

Collaboration in transportation between two or more agents is becoming an important approach to find efficient solutions or plans. Efficiency can be measured in, for example, lower cost or more flexibility. An important aspect of the collaboration is to decide on how to share the benefits-for example, cost, profit, or resources. There are many sharing mechanisms or cost allocations proposed in the literature. Some are based on simple proportional rules and others are based on theoretical concepts found in game theory. We provide a survey on cost allocation methods found in the literature on collaborative transportation, including problems on planning, vehicle routing, traveling salesman, distribution, and inventory. A total of 55 scientific articles compose the main part of the survey, most of them published between 2010 and 2015. We identify more than 40 cost allocation methods used in this stream of literature. We describe the theoretical basis for the main methods as well as the cases where they are used. We also report savings from the collaborations when they are based on industrial data. Some directions for future research are discussed.

A concise guide to existing and emerging vehicle routing problem variants

“…Due to strong competitive pressures and falling profit margins in the logistics sector, carriers have an incentive to form horizontal collaborations that pool their capacities and increase their overall efficiency (Cruijssen et al 2007, Gansterer and. In such coalitions, the planning of logistics operations is performed jointly through the exchange or consolidation of transportation requests and a redistribution of costs or gains, which leads to problems of fair resource allocation and profit sharing (Guajardo andRönnqvist 2016, Padilla Tinoco et al 2017). The collaboration should be stable in the sense that each partner's individual cost is reduced by joining the partnership and the benefit of these reductions is fairly distributed.…”

Planning of Truck Platoons: A Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

“…For examples of applications, see Lozano et al (2013); Frisk et al (2010); Krajewska et al (2008). For a review of studies, see Guajardo and Rönnqvist (2016).…”

Allocating revenues in a Smart TV ecosystem

“…For the reasons given above among others, there is great interest for many types of problems arising in networks, in particular in wireless communications and/or its integration with the Internet, in the Operations Research community (for recent references on the topic, see, e.g., Ribeiro et al., ; Risso et al., ; Morais and Mateus, ; Pagès‐Bernaus et al., ; Ye et al., ). Likewise, game theory has proved to be an interesting tool with which to analyze different problems, such as allocation/sharing problems (see, e.g., Petrosjan and Zaccour, ; Moretti and Patrone, ; Nagarajan and Sošić., ; Ackermann et al., ; Guajardo and Rönnqvist, ; Gutiérrez et al., ) or cooperation (see, e.g., Ahmadi‐Javid and Hoseinpour, ; Basso et al., ; Quintero‐Araujo et al., ), from many different areas of knowledge, in particular in communication network problems (see, e.g., Acemoglu and Ozdaglar, ; Gozalvez et al., ; Zhu and Başar, ; Bahbouni and Moussa, ; Goyal and Kaushal, ; van Hove, ; Taleizadeh et al., ; Wang et al., ; Colajanni et al., ; Geng and Mallik, ; Zeng et al., ). Furthermore, game theory has been also utilized to analyze engineering problems in the broadest sense (Sanchez‐Soriano, ).…”