The collaborative vehicle routing problem with consistency and workload balance (original) (raw)

1. Motivation The transportation industry has become a very competitive environment. While the number of competitors has grown considerably, customers have become more and more demanding. Therefore, companies need to provide efficient transportation services at low prices to be competitive on the market. For this reason, profit margins have sensibly declined. To increase their efficiency, carriers can establish collaborations in which they share their fleets with the aim to maximize their profit and reduce operational costs. Collaborations may be centralized, where decisions are made by an external decision maker having complete information. In decentralized collaborations, no such fully informed decision maker exists. Obviously, centralized collaborations allow a better exploitation of the available resources. Collaborations or shared resources do not only increase efficiency of logistics providers, but are also demanded by other stakeholders. Residents, for example, benefit from e...