01373231

Component

Trucking firms have been forced to develop innovative operational strategies to reduce costs because of an increasingly competitive environment in the trucking industry. There is also a great need to reduce deadheading miles of heavy trucks to help reduce the amount of air pollutants they emit. One way carriers and shippers are meeting these challenges is through collaborating their operations in various collaboration strategies. This work focuses on a group of shippers that collaborate their operations and form cycles between their long-haul shipping lanes. If the shippers provide the bundled lanes, as loops, to a common carrier they can realize cost savings from the carrier. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer program and forms least cost loops between the shipping lanes. A tabu search heuristic is used to solve the model and results using a real freight network reveal collaborative network costs savings between 7% to 12%. Three cost allocation mechanisms are proposed for the problem to distribute the costs to the shippers involved in the collaboration and computational results are provided for each of the allocation mechanisms.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT015(5) Paper Reviews -- Modeling

01362476

12-2165

English

20p

2012

Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Carriers; Cost allocation; Freight traffic; Heuristic methods; Mixed integer programming; Network analysis (Planning)

Data and Information Technology; Freight Transportation; I70: Traffic and Transport

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2012 Paper #12-2165

TRIS, TRB

Feb 8 2012 5:08PM