A collaborative planning approach for intermodal freight transportation

Very few research efforts have been spent on the coordination of plans and operations of independent service providers in an intermodal transportation chain. The impact of the lack of collaboration and coordination is pointed out in a setting considering overseas transports. It shows that due to information asymmetry and double marginalisation, costs considerably exceed the cost minimum of the whole transportation chain. In order to reduce these inefficiencies, a coordination scheme is elaborated which is able to identify significant improvements and which allows the service providers involved to keep their private planning domain with no disclosure of critical data. Due to the time lag in maritime transportation, uncertainties about future requests exist that could make the improvements achieved from coordination invalid. Hence, the effect of the stochastic demand on the coordinated plans is analysed.