The impact of horizontal collaboration on CO2 emissions due to road transportation

In this article we try to quantify the potential environmental benefits of horizontal collaboration in transportation and to study the sensibility of CO2 emissions to transportation cost reduction. We adopted an approach based on bi-objective mathematical modeling to minimize both total transportation cost and total environmental effect by simultaneously combining facility location and routing decisions in urban freight distribution. Extended known instances reflecting real distribution urban area are used to evaluate several goods delivery strategies. The results obtained by comparing a collaboration scenario and noncollaboration one, show that collaboration leads to a reduction in CO2 emissions, transportation cost, travelled distances and in addition to the improvement of the vehicle load rate. This work opens up new lines of research in this area.