Cost allocation methods in cooperative transportation planning

Sammanfattning: Transportation, together with transportation planning for goods, provides good conditions for economic growth and is a natural part of modern society. However, transportation has negative side effects, including emissions and traffic congestion. A freight forwarder may consolidate shippers’ goods in order to reduce some of the negative side effects, thus reducing emissions and/or congestion as well as operational costs. The negative side effects as well as operational costs can be further reduced if a number of freight forwarders cooperate and consolidate their collective goods flows. Consolidation refers to the process of merging a number of the freight forwarders’ shipments of goods into a single shipment. In this case, the freight forwarders are cooperating with competitors (the other freight forwarders).Fair cost allocations are important for establishing and maintaining cost-efficient cooperation among competing stakeholders. Cooperative game theory defines a number of criteria for fair cost allocations and the problem associated with the decision process for allocating costs is referred to as the cost allocation problem. In this thesis, cooperative game theory is used as an academic tool to study cooperation among stakeholders in two transportation planning applications, namely 1) the distribution of goods bound for urban areas and 2) the transportation of wood between harvest areas and industries.In transportation planning application 1, there is a cooperation among a number of freight forwarders and a municipality. Freight forwarders’ goods bound for an urban area are consolidated at a facility located just outside the urban area. In this thesis, operational costs for distributing the goods are assessed by solving vehicle routing problems. Common methods from cooperative game theory are used for allocating the operational costs among the freight forwarders and the municipality. In transportation planning application 2, forest companies cooperate in terms of the supply and transportation of common resources, or more specifically, different types of wood. Each forest company has harvest areas and industries to which the wood is transported. The resources may be bartered, that is, the forest companies may transport wood from each other’s harvest areas.In the cooperative game theory literature, the stakeholders are often treated equally in the context of transportation planning. However, there seems to be a lack of studies on cooperations where at least one stakeholder differs from the other stakeholders in some fundamental way, for instance, as an initiator or an enabler of the cooperation. Such cooperations are considered in this thesis. The municipality and one of the forest companies are considered to be the initiators in their respective applications.Five papers are appended to this thesis and the overall aim is to contribute to the research into cooperative transportation planning by using concepts from cooperative game theory to develop methods for allocating costs among cooperating stakeholders. The purpose of this thesis is to provide decision support for planners in the decisionmaking process of transportation planning to establish cost-efficient and stable cooperations.Some of the main outcomes of this thesis are viable and practical methods that could be used in real-life situations to allocate costs among cooperating stakeholders, as well as support for decisionmakers who are concerned with transportation planning. This is done by demonstrating the potential of cooperation, such as cost reduction, and by suggesting how costs can be allocated fairly in the transportation planning applications considered. Lastly, a contribution to cooperative game theory is provided; the introduction of a development of the equal profit method for allocating costs. The proposed version is the equal profit method with lexicography, which, in contrast to the former, guarantees to yield at most one solution to any cost allocation problem. Lexicography is used to rank potential cost allocations and the unambiguously best cost allocation is chosen.