The cost transportation game for collaboration among transportation companies

In modern transportation systems, the potential for further reducing costs is severely limited. Increased competitiveness through cost reduction can be achieved if there is a collaboration among transportation companies. Participation in such collaboration can benefit all participating companies as a whole, as well as each company individually, by increasing the participants’ competitiveness. In this study, we propose a game-theoretical approach for collaboration among transportation companies in a transportation system consisting of several independent transportation companies. We introduce a new transportation game called the cost transportation game (CTG) and prove that the CTG is a transferable utility game with a super additive characteristic function and a non-empty core. To obtain the core allocations, we introduce the restriction of a feasible solution and theoretically demonstrate that points in the core cannot be expressed only by dual optimal solutions but also by the optimal restrictive transportation scheme (ORTS), which implies that the points in the core can be obtained by solving ORTS and the core allocations can be realized by implementing ORTS. Finally, we present computational results for real-life and artificial instances.