Collaborative vehicle routing: a survey
This is an incremental survey paper that synthesizes existing literature on collaborative vehicle routing for logistics and transportation researchers and practitioners.
The paper surveys collaborative vehicle routing, where carriers form coalitions to jointly perform logistics operations, aiming to improve efficiency and sustainability by exchanging transportation requests. It identifies and reviews three major research streams: centralized collaborative planning, decentralized planning without auctions, and auction-based decentralized planning, providing a structured overview of the state of knowledge and future directions.
In horizontal collaborations, carriers form coalitions in order to perform parts of their logistics operations jointly. By exchanging transportation requests among each other, they can operate more efficiently and in a more sustainable way. Collaborative vehicle routing has been extensively discussed in the literature. We identify three major streams of research: (i) centralized collaborative planning, (ii) decentralized planning without auctions, and (ii) auction-based decentralized planning. For each of them we give a structured overview on the state of knowledge and discuss future research directions.