Top publication by Mario Guajardo
The article "Collaborative transportation with overlapping coalitions" has been published in European Journal of Operational Research.
European Journal of Operational Research is on level 4 in the ABS Academic Journal Guide.
Guajardo, Mario, Mikael Rönnqvist, Patrik Flisberg, and Mikael Frisk: Collaborative transportation with overlapping coalitions, European Journal of Operational Research, Online 07.05.2018.
Abstract
Most literature on collaborative transportation has focused on cost allocation, assuming as given which companies take part in the collaboration. However, a primary problem is the formation of coalitions. In this article, we study the so-called coalition configuration problem, in which any company can collaborate in more than one coalition. This is more general than the classic coalition structure problem, where a company must belong to only one coalition.
We develop two approaches for coalition configuration in transportation. One is area-driven, which assumes the whole territory is divided into areas and then finds coalitions within each area by integer linear models. The other approach consists of a mixed integer linear programming model that embeds the coalition configuration in the transportation problem.
Our motivation comes from a real world case in the forest fuels industry in Sweden, involving 27 companies, 200,000 transports, and 6 million tonnes of forest biomass, equivalent to 17 TWh of energy consumption. Collaborative transportation renders about 8 % of potential cost savings in this case, and may also help to increase the use of bioenergy. The coalition configuration increases by about 2.5 % the savings obtained by the coalition structure and is competitive with the savings of the grand coalition.