A benders decomposition approach for carrier collaborative planning with less than truckload transportation

Abstract

In collaborative logistics, multiple carriers form an alliance to optimise their transportation operations through sharing transportation tasks and vehicle capacities. We study a carrier collaborative planning problem with less than truckload transportation, where each capacitated vehicle may deliver multiple products from multiple origins to multiple destinations. Based on a mixed integer programming model, a benders decomposition approach which combines Pareto-optimal cuts and minimal infeasible subsystems cuts is proposed for the problem. From the solution of the model, a set of feasible vehicle tours can be constructed. Ninety randomly generated instances demonstrate the effectiveness of our benders decomposition approach.