Optimized Transport Planning through Coordinated Collaboration between Transport Companies

Abstract: This thesis studies a specific transport planning problem, which is based on a realistic scenario in the transport industry and deals with the delivery of goods by transport companies to their customers. The main aspect of the planning problem is to consider if each company should deliver the cargo on its own or through a collaboration of companies, in which the companies share the deliveries. In order to find out whether or not collaboration should take place, the transport planning problem is represented in terms of a mathematical optimization problem, which is formulated by using a column generation method and whose objective function involves minimization of costs. Three different solution cases are considered where each of them takes into account different combinations of vehicles used for delivering the cargo as well as the different maximum allowed driving time of the vehicles. The goal of the thesis is twofold; firstly, to see if the optimization problem can be solved and secondly, in case the problem is solvable, investigate whether it is beneficial for transport companies to collaborate under the aforementioned circumstances in order to incur lower costs in all instances considered. It turns out that both goals are achieved. To achieve the first goal, a few simplifications need to be made. The simplifications pertain both to the formulation of the problem and its implementation, as it is not only difficult to formulate a transport planning problem of this kind with respect to real life situations, but the problem is also difficult to solve due to its computational complexity. As for the second goal of the thesis, a numerical comparison between the different instances for the two scenarios demonstrates that the costs according to collaborative transport planning turns out to be considerably lower, which suggests that, under the circumstances considered in the thesis, collaboration between transport companies is beneficial for the companies involved.