Further insights into the allocation of greenhouse gas emissions to shipments in road freight transportation: The pollution routing game

Abstract

Abstract At present, there is no globally accepted standard for the allocation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to shipments in road freight transportation. The only official international standard for emission calculation of transport operations is the European Norm EN-16258. However, even this norm still allows choosing from several alternative emission allocation schemes. This research aims to harmonize the process of GHG declarations for supply chains by identifying among all allocation units specified by EN-16258 the one that describes a shipment's contribution to GHG emissions best. For this purpose, concepts of the cooperative game theory are used. First, we develop three transport scenarios that allow studying a shipment's effect on GHG: a vehicle routing problem, a network flow model, and a mixed scenario. Our approach extends previous research projects because we take into account that shipment characteristics in terms of origin, destination, weight, and volume consume transport capacities to different degrees, impact the routing of the commercial vehicles and, thus, determine GHG. Second, we present the results of a computational study that bases on the introduced transport scenarios and that compares the allocation vectors resulting from the EN-16258 allocation rules with the Shapley value, which serves as a benchmark for a shipment's contribution to GHG. Furthermore, we show how often the EN-16258 allocation principles are in line with a set of game theoretical fairness criteria. The results indicate that the allocation unit ‘distance’ is the closest to the game theory benchmark and most often in line with game theoretical fairness criteria.