A savings-based model for two-shipper cooperative routing

We introduce a methodology for operational planning of cooperation between two independent shippers who manage their own fleets of vehicles in a given geographic area. We assume that shippers are willing to establish partial cooperation by sharing only a subset of customers. Our approach is based on the iterative attempt of identifying subsets of shareable customers which can be fruitfully exchanged between shippers. We resort to classic concepts of vehicle routing literature such as savings and insertion costs, providing both a heuristic and an exact approach.