Decision Support for Collaboration of Carriers Based on Clustering, Swarm Intelligence and Shapley Value

Transportation costs constitute an important part in providing services and goods to customers. How to reduce transportation costs has a significant influence on competitive advantage of carriers. Although a lot of vehicle routing problems (VRP) and their variants have been extensively studied to reduce transportation costs via optimization of vehicle routes, little research focuses on how to achieve lower transportation costs through cooperation of carriers while fulfilling customer requests. This article aims to develop a decision support framework to facilitate cooperation of carriers to reduce transportation costs further based on information sharing, clustering requests, swarm intelligence, and the Shapley value cost allocation scheme. Two decision models for two carriers are compared: one reflecting the scenario without cooperation between the two carriers and the other one reflecting the scenario with cooperation between the two carriers. The simulation results indicate that the swarm intelligence and Shapley value based cooperative decision model outperforms that of the independent decision model.