Supply Chain and Logistics

I recently published a new paper in the journal Games.  You can see it below.

It deals with a very important logistics problem. In a cold chain, different parcels require different conditions of temperature. A multiple compartment vehicle can be sued to consolidate loads with different temperature characteristics in one vehicle.   But loading the vehicle at a low cost is a hard problem, requiring heuristics to solve.  And even then, how do we divide the cost of loading among the different package owners in a fair way?  ‘Fair’ here means that no group of owners will choose to leave the consolidation, because they cannot do better on their own than the cost they are charged.

The paper uses an inductive algorithm on top of a common heuristic to give a method for solution. There is a small example in the paper that shows how to apply the algorithm.

via Games | Free Full-Text | Sharing Loading Costs for Multi Compartment Vehicles

You can get the pdf here.  games-09-00025 (1) final version