Seminario 20/17: Behzad Hezarkhani (Brunel University London). Gain-sharing in urban consolidation centers

Información

Urbanconsolidation centers provide the logistical infrastructure for cooperationamong less-than-truckload carriers with contiguous destinations. The risingnumber of initiatives to establish and operate urban consolidation centers andtheir low success rates signal the need for better mechanisms to managecooperation in this context. We introduce and study cooperative situationscomprising a set of carriers with time sensitive deliveries who can consolidatetheir cargo to obtain savings. We introduce the class of Dispatch Consolidation(DC) games and search for ways to fairly allocate the obtained savings amongthe participating carriers. When delivery capacities are not restrictive, i.e.when waiting costs trigger truck dispatches, we show that stable allocations inthe core always exist and can, in their entirety, be found by solving a compactlinear program. With restrictive capacities, however, the core of a DC game maybecome empty. We introduce the notion of component-wise core for DC games topreserve stability first and foremost among the carriers whose deliveries aredispatched together in the chosen optimal solutions. The novelty of ourapproach is to link the stability requirements of an allocation rule with thestructure of selected solutions for the underlying optimization problems. Wecharacterize the component-wise cores of DC games, prove their non-emptiness,and suggest proportionally calculated allocations therein.