Consistent Collaborative Vehicle Utilization

ABSTRACT Carriers are often reluctant to collaborate with other carriers in delivering goods to customers despite potential cost reductions. A durable collaboration requires attention to more aspects. Carriers typically wish to remain competitive, unconstrained by the collaboration, increasing profits by attracting new customers and withholding information about their customers from the other carriers. They may also wish to provide good services, such as making all deliveries consistently at approximately the same time of the day. To facilitate this setting, we introduce a multi‐period collaborative model, the “consistent collaborative vehicle utilization” framework. Carriers engage in collaboration by borrowing trucks from each other. A borrowed truck first departs from the lender's depot to the borrowing carrier's depot and then visits delivery locations based on optimal routing decisions. Customers are served exclusively by their designated carrier and in an assigned time window, selected from a set of options specified by the customers. We formulate an integer programming problem and develop a branch‐and‐price algorithm to solve it. Additionally, to address larger instances, we propose two heuristics employing column generation techniques. Our experiments demonstrate reductions of up to 43% in the number of utilized vehicles, accompanied by a profit increase of up to 15.2%.