Enabling Decentralized Collaboration Among Transporters through an Optimizing Trading Network for Transport Orders

Abstract

Nowadays, at least 15-20% of the moving trucks in the European Union are completely or nearly empty. We suggest that this is mainly due to a large quantity of transport companies being small ; despite optimizing their routes, they will have to perform empty travels. Some approaches have been proposed to enable transport companies to consolidate their route through collaboration. These approaches either rely on global auction systems or require companies to share their information in a centralized optimizing system. We propose a novel approach where optimization software owned by different transport companies would trade transport orders through a standardized communication protocol to constitute a large and decentralized optimization system. We propose to build such a protocol and system based on the Very Large-Scale Neighborhood search (VLSN) optimization algorithm. It would maintain the confidentiality of private information and let the companies keep the control of the consolidation that the system will be able to explore. We conclude by listing research challenges related to this approach.

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