The Role of Collaborative Procurement of Transportation Services in Improving the Green Supply Chain Management

Abstract

The lack of collaborative opportunities for the procurement of truckload transportation services can expose companies to high costs while transporting their goods. Moreover, carriers are forced to perform many movements with empty trucks for repositioning which represent a big environmental challenge. Our idea is to conduct e-procurement auctions in order to encourage the companies to diversify their channels for the transportation procurement. In this context, combinatorial auctions (CAs) represent an ideal tool to achieve this goal. In this new settings, new decisional policies should be defined by both the companies and the carriers. This work stands from the carrier's viewpoint who would be interested to collaborate with his competitors in order to achieve savings and to contribute for a green supply chain management. In this paper, we solve the problem of generating bids to be submitted to CAs in order to ensure loads for trucks that would travel otherwise empty. We discuss an decision support model and validate it through computational experiments.