Cooperation Patterns between Fleet Owners for Transport Assignments

Abstract

We study cooperation patterns between the heavy-duty vehicle fleet owners to reduce their costs, improve their fuel efficiency, and decrease their emissions. We consider a distributed cooperation pattern in which the fleet owners can communicate directly with each other to form alliances. A centralized cooperation pattern is studied in which the fleet owners pay to subscribe to a third-party service provider that pairs their vehicles for cooperation. The effects of various pricing strategies on the behaviour of fleet owners and their inclusiveness are analyzed. It is shown that the fleet size has an essential role.