Decision Support Systems for Transport Collaboration

Collaborative initiatives have gained significant interest and importance recently from academia as well as industry as an environmentally conscious, yet efficient and effective strategy for the transport of raw materials and finished products in the supply chain. Transport collaboration can be considered to be strategic asset for optimizing the supply chain and improving the competitiveness of companies. A group of shippers and carriers from the same or different lines of business can form transport coalitions in order to reap benefits from coordinated freight movement. However, building a coalition is not always an easy task, and some collaborative initiatives fail to deliver the desired added value for all parties involved, ultimately ending in the dissolution of the collaboration. Therefore, this book investigates the successful design and implementation of transport collaboration in heterarchical transport network with the use of decision support systems. The book aims at establishing a management decision tool to support building a transport coalition.