Design and scenario assessment for collaborative logistics and freight transport systems

Collaboration between partners is a very popular subject in both logistics and decision support research. However, transport management is often taken into account only as an external cost, without integration in collaborative reasoning. This paper proposes a framework to assess collaborative solutions in the context of logistics and freight transport, as well as to describe the links between freight transport and supply chain managementin terms of collaboration techniques. First the main concepts of collaborative logistics in the distribution and transport fields are presented, highlighting the links between collaboration, freight transport and supply chain management. Then, the method to assess collaborative logistics and freight transport solutions is proposed. This method includes a design scheme, a hierarchic clustering technique and a dominance analysis method to unify the assessment of each individual and prepare collaborative research for a common solution. After that, the method is applied to the assessment of five scenarios derived from a real situation for the urban area of Lyon, France) to illustrate how difficult convergence towards consensus is. The results show that a global optimal solution for the entire set of stakeholders is not easy to identify, and how the proposed method can be helpful for decision makers to achieve a consensus of common objectives.