The Study On Collaborative Transportation And Cost Allocation Among Urban Transport Enterprises

A well-developed city logistics helps to meet market demand, promote economic development, and improve the economical and reasonable utilization of social resources. Due to the shorter product life cycle, rising oil prices and labor costs, and restrictions on traffic and higher consumer expectations, city logistics carriers are facing a low profit margin and low price competition. Establishing cooperation among city logistic providers will broaden their combination of resources, enhance the market positioning, and then plan more efficient transport routes and decrease asset repositioning cost. However, they still have many challenges and impediments, cost measurement and allocation is one of main obstacles for cooperation. Thus, this study uniquely combined vehicle routing problem with cost allocation theory. A collaborative vehicle planning model is built to evaluate the marginal cost and provided reference for the individual cooperation decision-making. Based on the characteristics of city logistic cooperation, an improved collaborative transportation cost allocation model is established which according to Shapley value method and has taken some important factors which will influence the cost allocation into consideration. Finally a numerical example is analyzed, and verifies the feasibility of the model.