Equitable apportionment of railcars within a pooling agreement for shipping automobiles

This paper examines the problem of apportioning a railcar fleet to car manufacturers and railroads within a pooling agreement for shipping automobiles. We demonstrate the potential inequities in the presently implemented allocation procedure in the industry, and we propose four alternative schemes to apportion railcars to manufacturers and an alternative railroad allocation scheme. We test the combinations of current and proposed techniques on realistic instances derived from representative data of the current business environment, and illustrate their impact relative to the existing methodology.

Research highlights►Addresses equitable allocation of a fleet of railcars among participants in a pooling agreement. ►Demonstrates potential inequities in the presently implemented railcar allocation procedure in the industry. ►Shows that the presently implemented carrier allocation mechanism is founded on a Shapley value-based approach. ►Proposes, illustrates, and tests (relative to existing methodology) alternative combinations of schemes to apportion railcars to manufacturers and to railroads.