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Joint route planning with customer priorities

We consider a less-than-truckload, last-mile delivery problem for a group of collaborating companies that operate in the same geographical region. Due to what is called “geographical overlap” in the distribution area, the total number of kilometres driven can be reduced if shipments of different suppliers are redistributed over the available vehicles such that each vehicle serves a part of the area.

By means of a set of computational experiments, we study the relationship between the following problem-specific elements: the individual partner’s strategy when setting the customer priorities, the route planning and the allocation of operational costs among the collaborating partners.