A Share-First-Plan-Second Policy for Collaboration in Transportation Networks

Collaboration in transportation networks has been a cornerstone of policies towards more sustainable transportation as it should facilitate a better modal split and result in higher fill rates of transportation modes. However, effective collaboration between transportation firms requires some form of joint planning between the firms. In practice, this is often difficult to achieve from an IT point of view and hard to maintain due to the daily dependency on advanced planning software. In this paper, we present a simple but effective policy for collaborative transportation that does not require a complete joint planning of operations. In this share-first-plan-second policy, the collaborating firms first develop a cyclic schedule for a fleet of shared transportation modes and then assign their shipments to the transportation modes in real-time. This simple collaborative policy clearly outperforms the setting where each firm operates its transportation modes independently in terms of modal split and fill rates. What is more, it is shown to perform almost as good as a complete joint planning of operations while not requiring the advanced IT systems and planning software. Finally, the share-first-plan-second policy is very robust against deviations from planned transport operations, which further contributes to its applicability in practice.