Today, the challenge of economy regarding freight transport is to generate flows
of goods extremely fast, handling information in short times, optimizing decisions,
and reducing the percentage of vehicles that circulate empty over the total amount
of transportation means, with benefits to roads congestion and the environment,
besides economy. Logistic operators need to pose attention on suitable planning
methods in order to reduce their costs, fuel consumption and emissions, as well as
to gain economy of scale. To ensure the maximum efficacy, planning should be also
based on cooperation between the involved subjects. Collaboration in logistics is
an effective approach for business to obtain a competitive edge. In a successful
collaboration, parties involved from suppliers, customers, and even competitors
perform a coordinated effort to realize the potential benefit of collaboration,
including reduced costs, decreased lead times, and improved asset utilization and
service level. In addition to these benefit, having a broader supply chain perspective
enables firms to make better-informed decisions on strategic issues.
The first aim of the present Thesis is to propose a planning approach based on
mathematical programming techniques to improve the efficiency of road services of
a single carrier combining multiple trips in a port environment (specifically, import,
export and inland trips). In this way, in the same route, more than two transportation
services can be realized with the same vehicle thus significantly reducing the number
of total empty movements. Time windows constraints related to companies and
terminal opening hours as well as to ship departures are considered in the problem
formulation. Moreover, driving hours restrictions and trips deadlines are taken into
account, together with goods compatibility for matching different trips.
The second goal of the Thesis is to define innovative planning methods and
optimization schemes of logistic networks in which several carriers are present and
the decisional actors operate in a cooperative scenario in which they share a portion
of their demand. The proposed approaches are characterized by the adoption both of
Game Theory methods and of new original methods of profits distribution