Vehicle Routing under Consideration of Transhipment in Horizontal Coalitions of Freight Carriers

In order to reduce operational costs related to transportation activities in road haulage, small and medium-sized freight carriers can establish horizontal coalitions and share their resources. Through exchange of customer requests with other members within the coalition, carriers can improve the operational efficiency of their transportation processes. In this paper, transhipment is integrated into the conventional pickup and delivery problem in the collaborative context. Specifically, vehicles involved in transferring the same request are synchronized at the transhipment points. A mixed-integer programming model is proposed for this problem. Based on this model the benefits of transhipment are analysed. Computational results show considerable cost-savings enabled by transhipment in the operational planning of carrier coalitions.