Collaboration among small shippers in cargo transportation

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Endüstri Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2009

Öğrenci: ÖZHAN YILMAZ

Danışman: SEÇİL SAVAŞANERİL TÜFEKCİ

Özet:

As a result of widespread and effective usage of internet, firms tend to collaborate to reduce their operating costs. This thesis analyzes collaboration opportunities for a group of small shippers. A transportation intermediary determining the optimal actions for arriving shippers and a mechanism allocating savings to the shippers is proposed in the thesis. The performance of the intermediary is assessed by using computational analyses. An experimental set is formed that is by changing the parameters that are expected to significantly affect the optimal policy structure and the surplus budget (or deficit) changes. It is seen that increasing variable costs like cross-assignment cost and waiting cost leads to the increase in comparative performance of the optimal policy compared to the naïve policy, which is defined according to a simple rule, although increasing dispatching cost, which can be considered as a fixed cost, leads to an opposite result. The performance of the optimal policy is also assessed by using a myopic policy, in which shippers are trying to maximize their own benefit without considering the overall benefit of the grand coalition.