Rolling Horizon Planning Approaches for a Dynamic Collaborative Routing Problem with Full Truckload Pickup and Delivery Requests

In order to improve the operational efficiency of small and mid-sized freight carriers, collaborative transportation planning (CTP) approaches enabling an exchange of customer requests are proposed for horizontal carrier coalitions. Through request exchange carriers can further reduce their costs of fulfilling customer requests compared to the case of isolated planning in which no request is exchanged. In order to exploit the potentials of cost-savings embedded in CTP, appropriate request exchange mechanisms have to be developed. In this paper, the dynamic CTP problem of a coalition of full truckload freight carriers is studied. Two rolling horizon planning approaches are developed to solve the dynamic routing problems. It is further analyzed how the planning results especially the cost reduction realized by performing CTP are influenced by different planning settings. Computational experiments show that the planning results of CTP are obviously superior to those obtained by isolated planning, and the realized cost-savings in percent remain relatively constant, independently of the test settings.