Collaborative Logistics from the Perspective of Road Transportation Companies

To survive under the ever increasing competitive and global pressures to operate more efficiently, transportation companies are obliged to adopt a collaborative focus. Various types of cooperative supply chain relationships have been discussed in both professional and academic literature over the last decades. However, research on horizontal cooperation in logistics remains scarce and scattered across various research domains. Companies operating at the same level of the supply chain and performing comparable logistics functions may cooperate horizontally to increase their productivity, improve their service level and enhance their market position. In this paper, the focus is on the operational planning of horizontal cooperations between road transportation carriers. Following a scientific literature review, a distinction may be made between two operational approaches to horizontal logistics collaboration: order sharing and capacity sharing. For both research streams, a detailed overview of solution techniques proposed in literature is presented. Moreover, some interesting opportunities for future research are identified.